Nasa Scientist Quotes

NASA scientists have discovered a new form of life, unfortunately, it won't date them either.

Boys who cry can work for Google. Boys who trash computers cannot. I once was at a science conference, and I saw a NASA scientist who had just found out that his project was canceled—a project he’d worked on for years. He was maybe sixty-five years old, and you know what? He was crying. And I thought, Good for him. That’s why he was able to reach retirement age working in a job he loved.

NASA scientists calculated in 2013 that nuclear power has actually prevented an average of 1.84 million air pollution-related deaths and 64 gigatonnes of CO2-equivalent greenhouse gas emissions that would have resulted from fossil fuel burning between 1971 and 2009.68

An invention is a responsibility of the individual, society cannot invent, it can only applaud the invention and inventor.

As NASA scientist Jay Bergstralh has put it: “Wherever we go on Earth—even into what’s seemed like the most hostile possible environments for life—as long as there is liquid water and some source of chemical energy we find life.

as the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle are fitted together. A good yardstick was found in UFOs and Diamagnetism. According to the author, Eugene Burt,

Second-mountain organizations touch people at their depths and leave a permanent mark. You always know when you meet a Marine, a Morehouse man, a Juilliard pianist, a NASA scientist. These institutions have a collective purpose, a shared set of rituals, a common origin story. They nurture thick relationships and demand full commitment. They don’t merely educate; they transform.

I have my own religion. My conception of religion is being to the other fellow what you would like for him to be to you and do what you think is necessary to be the type of man that God could appreciate.

That NASA was involved suggests that L.A. was considered so alien both to police officers and to scientists that it resembled the landscape of another world. There is Mars, there is the moon, and there is Los Angeles.

During World War II, when combat rations were tinned, meat hashes were a common entrée because they worked well with the filling machines. “But the men wanted something they could chew, something into which they could ‘sink their teeth,’” wrote food scientist Samuel Lepkovsky in a 1964 paper making the case against a liquid diet for the Gemini astronauts. He summed up the soldiers’ take on potted meat: “We could undoubtedly survive on these rations a lot longer than we’d care to live.” (NASA went ahead and tested an all-milkshake meal plan on groups of college students living in a simulated space capsule at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in 1964. A significant portion of it ended up beneath the floorboards.)

NASA documents from 1966 confirm the United States weather modification programme with a budget of hundreds of millions of dollars and in the 1990s the US military was publishing papers expounding the war possibilities of weather manipulation, or 'geoengineering' as it is also known. American scientist J. Marvin Herndon described in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health in 2015 how weather modification has been happening for decades and includes the 'make mud, not war' programme named Project Popeye to create monsoon-scale rain during the Vietnam War. US Air Force document AF 2025 Final Report published in 1996 explained how artificially-generated floods, hurricanes, droughts and earthquakes 'offers the war fighter a wide range of possible options to defeat or coerce an adversary'.

Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in Russia, Hermann Olberth in Germany, and Robert Goddard in the United States all came up with an eerily similar concept for using liquid fuel to power rockets for human spaceflight. I've seen this pointed out as an odd coincidence, one of those moments when an idea inexplicably emerges in multiple places at once. But when I read through each of these three men's biographies I discovered why they all had the same idea: all three of them were obsessed with Jules Verne's 1865 novel "De la terre a la lune (From the Earth to the Moon)." The novel details the strange adventures of three space explorers who travel to the moon together. What sets Verne's book apart from the other speculative fiction of the time was his careful attention to the physics involved in space travel -- his characters take pains to explain to each other exactly how and why each concept would work. All three real-life scientists -- the Russian, the German, and the American -- were following what they had learned from a French science fiction writer.

And it wasn’t just one warning. Eight years before the Panel on Climate Change’s report, an assessment of global warming’s impacts in New York City had also cautioned of potential flooding. “Basically pretty much everything that we projected happened,” says Cynthia Rosenzweig, a senior research scientist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, the cochair of the Panel on Climate Change and coauthor of that 2001 report.

In 1969, NASA scientist James Lovelock noticed something unusual happening in the earth’s atmosphere: inexplicably, its balance of oxygen and other gases was regulating itself like a thermostat. But what was doing the regulating? He looked at other planetary processes—including the stable concentration of ocean salinity and the cycling of nutrients—and came to a startling conclusion: the earth is alive. He proposed that the earth is a superorganism—one giant living system that includes not just animals and plants but rocks, gases, and soil—acting together as if the planet was a single living being. Its bodily systems, such as the water cycle and nitrogen cycle, are balanced to maintain life on earth. The throb of the tides was the systole and diastole of the earth, and water coursed like blood through its veins. We proud humans may simply be microbes on the surface of a superbeing whose entirety we cannot fully comprehend. Like the bacteria in our body, is it possible that we, too, are part of a larger living earth, a speck on the eyeball of the universe? Tree roots break the sidewalk. Dandelions spring through the cracks. Insects grow resistant to pesticides

It’s talk like this that thrills and amazes people in the aerospace industry, who have long been hoping that some company would come along and truly revolutionize space travel. Aeronautics experts will point out that twenty years after the Wright brothers started their experiments, air travel had become routine. The launch business, by contrast, appears to have frozen. We’ve been to the moon, sent research vehicles to Mars, and explored the solar system, but all of these things are still immensely expensive one-off projects. “The cost remains extraordinarily high because of the rocket equation,” said Carol Stoker, the planetary scientist at NASA. Thanks to military and government contracts from agencies like NASA, the aerospace industry has historically had massive budgets to work with and tried to make the biggest, most reliable machines it could. The business has been tuned to strive for maximum performance, so that the aerospace contractors can say they met their requirements. That strategy makes sense if you’re trying to send up a $1 billion military satellite for the U.S. government and simply cannot afford for the payload to blow up.

All that we have seen in this work shows us one clear fact: The Qur'an, this extraordinary book which was revealed to the Seal of the Prophets, Muhammad (saas), is a source of inspiration and true knowledge. The book of Islam-no matter what subject it refers to-is being proved as Allah's word as each new piece of historical, scientific or archaeological information comes to light. Facts about scientific subjects and the news delivered to us about the past and future, facts that no one could have known at the time of the Qur'an's revelation, are announced in its verses. It is impossible for this information, examples of which we have discussed in detail in this book, to have been known with the level of knowledge and technology available in 7th century Arabia. With this in mind, let us ask: Could anyone in 7th century Arabia have known that our atmosphere is made up of seven layers? Could anyone in 7th century Arabia have known in detail the various stages of development from which an embryo grows into a baby and then enters the world from inside his mother? Could anyone in 7th century Arabia have known that the universe is "steadily expanding," as the Qur'an puts it, when modern scientists have only in recent decades put forward the idea of the "Big Bang"? Could anyone in 7th century Arabia have known about the fact that each individual's fingertips are absolutely unique, when we have only discovered this fact recently, using modern technology and modern scientific equipment? Could anyone in 7th century Arabia have known about the role of one of Pharaoh's most prominent aids, Haman, when the details of hieroglyphic translation were only discovered two centuries ago? Could anyone in 7th century Arabia have known that the word "Pharaoh" was only used from the 14th century B.C. and not before, as the Old Testament erroneously claims? Could anyone in 7th century Arabia have known about Ubar and Iram's Pillars, which were only discovered in recent decades via the use of NASA satellite photographs? The only answer to these questions is as follows: the Qur'an is the word of the Almighty Allah, the Originator of everything and the One Who encompasses everything with His knowledge. In one verse, Allah says, "If it had been from other than Allah, they would have found many inconsistencies in it." (Qur'an, 4:82) Every piece of information the Qur'an contains reveals the secret miracles of this divine book. The human being is meant to hold fast to this Divine Book revealed by Allah and to receive it with an open heart as his one and only guide in life. In the Qur'an, Allah tells us the following: This Qur'an could never have been devised by any besides Allah. Rather it is confirmation of what came before it and an elucidation of the Book which contains no doubt from the Lord of all the worlds. Do they say, "He has invented it"? Say: "Then produce a sura like it and call on anyone you can besides Allah if you are telling the truth." (Qur'an, 10:37-38) And this is a Book We have sent down and blessed, so follow it and have fear of Allah so that hopefully you will gain mercy. (Qur'an, 6:155)

Stanford University’s John Koza, who pioneered genetic programming in 1986, has used genetic algorithms to invent an antenna for NASA, create computer programs for identifying proteins, and invent general purpose electrical controllers. Twenty-three times Koza’s genetic algorithms have independently invented electronic components already patented by humans, simply by targeting the engineering specifications of the finished devices—the “fitness” criteria. For example, Koza’s algorithms invented a voltage-current conversion circuit (a device used for testing electronic equipment) that worked more accurately than the human-invented circuit designed to meet the same specs. Mysteriously, however, no one can describe how it works better—it appears to have redundant and even superfluous parts. But that’s the curious thing about genetic programming (and “evolutionary programming,” the programming family it belongs to). The code is inscrutable. The program “evolves” solutions that computer scientists cannot readily reproduce. What’s more, they can’t understand the process genetic programming followed to achieve a finished solution. A computational tool in which you understand the input and the output but not the underlying procedure is called a “black box” system. And their unknowability is a big downside for any system that uses evolutionary components. Every step toward inscrutability is a step away from accountability, or fond hopes like programming in friendliness toward humans. That doesn’t mean scientists routinely lose control of black box systems. But if cognitive architectures use them in achieving AGI, as they almost certainly will, then layers of unknowability will be at the heart of the system. Unknowability might be an unavoidable consequence of self-aware, self-improving software.

Obama is also directing the U.S. government to invest billions of dollars in solar and wind energy. In addition, he is using bailout leverage to compel the Detroit auto companies to build small, “green” cars, even though no one in the government has investigated whether consumers are interested in buying small, “green” cars—the Obama administration just believes they should. All these measures, Obama recognizes, are expensive. The cap and trade legislation is estimated to impose an $850 billion burden on the private sector; together with other related measures, the environmental tab will exceed $1 trillion. This would undoubtedly impose a significant financial burden on an already-stressed economy. These measures are billed as necessary to combat global warming. Yet no one really knows if the globe is warming significantly or not, and no one really knows if human beings are the cause of the warming or not. For years people went along with Al Gore’s claim that “the earth has a fever,” a claim illustrated by misleading images of glaciers disappearing, oceans swelling, famines arising, and skies darkening. Apocalypse now! Now we know that the main body of data that provided the basis for these claims appears to have been faked. The Climategate scandal showed that scientists associated with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were quite willing to manipulate and even suppress data that did not conform to their ideological commitment to global warming.3 The fakers insist that even if you discount the fakery, the data still show.... But who’s in the mood to listen to them now? Independent scientists who have reviewed the facts say that average global temperatures have risen by around 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit in the past 100 years. Lots of things could have caused that. Besides, if you project further back, the record shows quite a bit of variation: periods of warming, followed by periods of cooling. There was a Medieval Warm Period around 1000 A.D., and a Little Ice Age that occurred several hundred years later. In the past century, the earth warmed slightly from 1900 to 1940, then cooled slightly until the late 1970s, and has resumed warming slightly since then. How about in the past decade or so? Well, if you count from 1998, the earth has cooled in the past dozen years. But the statistic is misleading, since 1998 was an especially hot year. If you count from 1999, the earth has warmed in the intervening period. This statistic is equally misleading, because 1999 was a cool year. This doesn’t mean that temperature change is in the eye of the beholder. It means, in the words of Roy Spencer, former senior scientist for climate studies at NASA, that “all this temperature variability on a wide range of time scales reveals that just about the only thing constant in climate is change.”4

Similarly, the computers used to run the software on the ground for the mission were borrowed from a previous mission. These machines were so out of date that Bowman had to shop on eBay to find replacement parts to get the machines working. As systems have gone obsolete, JPL no longer uses the software, but Bowman told me that the people on her team continue to use software built by JPL in the 1990s, because they are familiar with it. She said, “Instead of upgrading to the next thing we decided that it was working just fine for us and we would stay on the platform.” They have developed so much over such a long period of time with the old software that they don’t want to switch to a newer system. They must adapt to using these outdated systems for the latest scientific work. Working within these constraints may seem limiting. However, building tools with specific constraints—from outdated technologies and low bitrate radio antennas—can enlighten us. For example, as scientists started to explore what they could learn from the wait times while communicating with deep space probes, they discovered that the time lag was extraordinarily useful information. Wait times, they realized, constitute an essential component for locating a probe in space, calculating its trajectory, and accurately locating a target like Pluto in space. There is no GPS for spacecraft (they aren’t on the globe, after all), so scientists had to find a way to locate the spacecraft in the vast expanse. Before 1960, the location of planets and objects in deep space was established through astronomical observation, placing an object like Pluto against a background of stars to determine its position.15 In 1961, an experiment at the Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex in California used radar to more accurately define an “astronomical unit” and help measure distances in space much more accurately.16 NASA used this new data as part of creating the trajectories for missions in the following years. Using the data from radio signals across a wide range of missions over the decades, the Deep Space Network maintained an ongoing database that helped further refine the definition of an astronomical unit—a kind of longitudinal study of space distances that now allows missions like New Horizons to create accurate flight trajectories. The Deep Space Network continued to find inventive ways of using the time lag of radio waves to locate objects in space, ultimately finding that certain ways of waiting for a downlink signal from the spacecraft were less accurate than others. It turned to using the antennas from multiple locations, such as Goldstone in California and the antennas in Canberra, Australia, or Madrid, Spain, to time how long the signal took to hit these different locations on Earth. The time it takes to receive these signals from the spacecraft works as a way to locate the probes as they are journeying to their destination. Latency—or the different time lag of receiving radio signals on different locations of Earth—is the key way that deep space objects are located as they journey through space. This discovery was made possible during the wait times for communicating with these craft alongside the decades of data gathered from each space mission. Without the constraint of waiting, the notion of using time as a locating feature wouldn’t have been possible.

A well-known example lies in the attempt of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) (through its Office of Public Affairs) to silence Dr. Jim Hansen, the agency’s chief climate scientist. According to NASA’s inspector general, the office undertook “unilateral actions in editing or downgrading press releases or denying media access on a known controversial topic.

And while the black women are the most hidden of the mathematicians who worked at the NACA, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, and later at NASA, they were not sitting alone in the shadows: the white women who made up the majority of Langley’s computing workforce over the years have hardly been recognized for their contributions to the agency’s long-term success. Virginia Biggins worked the Langley beat for the Daily Press newspaper, covering the space program starting in 1958. “Everyone said, ‘This is a scientist, this is an engineer,’ and it was always a man,” she said in a 1990 panel on Langley’s human computers. She never got to meet any of the women. “I just assumed they were all secretaries,” she said. Five

In May 1985 the historic paper was published that announced an “ozone hole” in the Southern Hemisphere.11 The news shocked the scientific world. If true, the results proved that humankind had already exceeded a global limit. CFC use had grown above sustainable limits. Humans were already in the process of destroying their ozone shield. Scientists at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration of the United States (NASA) scrambled to check readings on atmospheric ozone made by the Nimbus 7 satellite, measurements that had been taken routinely since 1978. Nimbus 7 had never indicated an ozone hole. Checking back, NASA scientists found that their computers had been programmed to reject very low ozone readings on the assumption that such low readings must indicate instrument error.12 Fortunately the measurements thrown out by the computer were recoverable. They confirmed the Halley Bay observations, showing that ozone levels had been dropping over the South Pole for a decade. Furthermore, they provided a detailed map of the hole in the ozone layer. It was enormous, about the size of the continental United States, and it had been getting larger and deeper every year.

Love is risk. Love is cost. Love is what NASA scientists say about failure: how there's no such thing, only early attempts at success.

Space Exploration Ethics 101 If we can colonize Mars, we can heal the Earth. But that's not the point here. The point is, we gotta explore space just like we gotta explore anything unknown - but we must do so as humble scientists, not as steroid-pumped, illegitimate offspring of musky retards like Columbus. We gotta explore space just like we explore the Arctic. Humankind has several outposts in the Arctic, dedicated solely to research - our endeavors into other planets oughta be exactly like that. Otherwise, what starts out as space exploration will soon turn into space imperialism, and will do to other planets what white terrorists have been doing to the indegenous people on earth for ages. Therefore, focus on space exploration, not on space colonization. Let me put this into perspective. NASA, ISRO, CNSA, ESA, KARI, JAXA (and more) - these represent the real democratic aspirations of humankind's endeavors of curiosity into space, whereas SpaceX, Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic these are the new-age posterboys of space imperialism. All I say is this, O Brave Explorers of Space - your mission is to explore the universe to facilitate human welfare, not to be some retarded billionaire's backboneless underwear. Beware, I repeat - space exploration doesn't turn into space imperialism!

NASA, ISRO, CNSA, ESA, KARI, JAXA (and more) - these represent the real democratic aspirations of humankind's endeavors of curiosity into space, whereas SpaceX, Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic these are the new-age posterboys of space imperialism.

The facts have been piling up for decades. They become more elaborate, and more concerning, with each passing year. And yet for some reason we have been unable to change course. The past half-century is littered with milestones of inaction. A scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change first began to form in the mid-1970s. The first international climate summit was held in 1979, three years before I was born. The NASA climate scientist James Hansen gave his landmark testimony to the US Congress in 1988, explaining how the combustion of fossil fuels was driving climate breakdown. The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was adopted in 1992 to set non-binding limits on greenhouse gas emissions. International climate summits – the UN Congress of Parties – have been held annually since 1995 to negotiate plans for emissions reductions. The UN framework has been extended three times, with the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, the Copenhagen Accord in 2009, and the Paris Agreement in 2015. And yet global CO2 emissions continue to rise year after year, while ecosystems unravel at a deadly pace. Even though we have known for nearly half a century that human civilisation itself is at stake, there has been no progress in arresting ecological breakdown. None. It is an extraordinary paradox. Future generations will look back on us and marvel at how we could have known exactly what was going on, in excruciating detail, and yet failed to solve the problem.

Ricardo Semler wrote a most interesting book about an including business culture (1995). He describes a Brazilian company that manufactured customized pumps.

for example, a student wants to learn about space, she doesn’t ask her teacher what space is like. She visits NASA.gov to read blogs by astronauts and scientists. She may even connect with astronauts, such as Commander Hadfield, directly through Twitter.

How do we know that Earth has warmed? Scientists have been taking widespread measurements of Earth’s surface temperature since around 1880. These data have steadily improved and, today, temperatures are recorded by thermometers at many thousands of locations, both on the land and over the oceans. Different research groups, including the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, Britain’s Hadley Centre for Climate Change, the Japan Meteorological Agency, and NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center have used these raw measurements to produce records of long-term global surface temperature change (Figure 1). These groups work carefully to make sure the data aren’t skewed by such things as changes in the instruments taking the measurements or by other factors that affect local temperature, such as additional heat that has come from the gradual growth of cities.

Gazing over the countless fluctuations and transformations in Earth’s multibillion-year history, I am struck by the unique strangeness of the present moment. We suddenly find ourselves sort of running a planet—a role we never anticipated or sought—without knowing how it should be done. We’re at the controls, but we’re not in control. This book is my view of how we got into this situation, and where that leaves us now. A child of the space age, I grew up captivated by the romance of planetary exploration. My timing was right to become a NASA research scientist working in the new field of astrobiology, the scientific study of life in the universe. My participation in the spacecraft exploration of other planets has informed my view of our presence on this

While the JSC’s primary focus was the stars, scores of scientists there also toiled daily to make life on Earth better. Everything from memory foam to scratchproof eyeglass lenses came from the JSC, using NASA technology developed for spaceflight. If travel to the stars represented the cutting edge of technological achievement, then the JSC was forever sharpening the blade. After

a timid smile as she held up an astronomy award for her asteroid discoveries. Exactly how long had this woman worked at NASA? I wondered. Did women even work at NASA as scientists during the 1950s? Unfortunately it looked like I might never find out. Helin had passed away a year before, in 2009. When my daughter was born, in the last hours of December 14, 2010, we

Flying saucers aside, a visceral childhood fascination with what’s out there, launched by pop culture and propelled by real-life space missions during NASA’s heyday, is a recurring narrative among SETI researchers. “I’m a child of the Apollo era,” said Mark Showalter, a Sagan Center senior research scientist. “I’m in this room today because of Neil Armstrong. Watching the moonwalk — that was the most exciting thing I’d ever seen in my life.” To date, Showalter has discovered, or co-discovered, six moons in the solar system: Pan (orbiting Saturn); Mab and Cupid (Uranus); Kerberos and Styx (Pluto); and just last year, a Neptune moon, still unnamed. “We could be sending missions to all kinds of fantastic destinations and learning things for decades to come,” he said. But the scheduled NASA voyages to the outer planets appear nearly done.  The New Horizons spacecraft flies by Pluto next year; the probes to Jupiter and Saturn shut down in 2017. Even the much-heralded Clipper mission — the proposed robotic expedition to Europa — isn’t yet a go. So far, with a projected $2 billion cost, only $170 million has been appropriated. At 56, Showalter concedes that his professional career will conclude with these final journeys. “It takes twenty years from the time you start thinking about the project to the time you actually get to the outer planets,” he said. And without new missions, he worries, and wonders, about the new generation. “It’s the missions that capture imaginations. If those aren’t happening, kids might not go into science the way my generation did.

In 2009 the staid British journal New Scientist published an article with the provocative title “Space Storm Alert: 90 Seconds from Catastrophe,” which opens with the following lines: It is midnight on 22 September 2012 and the skies above Manhattan are filled with a flickering curtain of colourful light. Few New Yorkers have seen the aurora this far south but their fascination is short-lived. Within a few seconds, electric bulbs dim and flicker, then become unusually bright for a fleeting moment. Then all the lights in the state go out. Within 90 seconds, the entire eastern half of the US is without power. A year later and millions of Americans are dead and the nation’s infrastructure lies in tatters. The World Bank declares America a developing nation. Europe, Scandinavia, China and Japan are also struggling to recover from the same fateful event—a violent storm, 150 million kilometres away on the surface of the Sun. It sounds ridiculous. Surely the Sun couldn’t create so profound a disaster on Earth. Yet an extraordinary report funded by NASA and issued by the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) . . . claims it could do just that. (Brooks 2009; see also National Research Council 2008 for the NAS report that New Scientist is referring to) In fact, this scenario is not so ridiculous at all, as the New Scientist article goes on to relate (see also International Business Times 2011b; Lovett 2011; National Research Council 2008). Indeed, if things do not change, it may be inevitable.

David Kord Murray, a former rocket scientist42 who worked on projects for NASA and later became the head of innovation at Intuit, made a study of connective creativity in his book Borrowing Brilliance. According to Murray, “The nature of innovation [is that] we build new ideas out of existing ideas.” Murray cites Einstein, Walt Disney, George Lucas, and Steve Jobs as prime examples of innovators who “defined problems, borrowed ideas, and then made new combinations.

The complete Apollo team...directly involves slightly over 400,000 people...Included are some if the country's foremost scientists and engineers. This mobilization of men and resources is unprecedented in history since WWII

down instead of from Twenty-Third Street looking up—things look quite a bit different. From that angle, the annoyed, hustling and bustling, highly important people angling their way through the obstacle course of onlookers seem insignificant. Our sun and moon and eight planets are just one little neighborhood among an estimated 200 billion neighborhoods that make up our universe.19 If we think of the Milky Way galaxy as being the size of the entire continent of North America, our solar system would fit into a coffee cup.20 Two Voyager spacecrafts are cruising toward the edge of the solar system at a rate of more than 35,000 miles per hour. They’ve been doing that for more than forty years and have traveled more than 11 billion miles, with no end in sight.21 When NASA sends communication to one of those Voyagers traveling at that velocity, it takes about seventeen hours to get there.22 That data has led scientists to estimate that to send a “speed of light” message to the edge of the universe would take more than 15 billion years to arrive.23 “So, yes, Chelsea art dealer, you are very important. But when we think about what we’re all gazing at while you make your agitation known through grunts and mumbles, you’re also impossibly young, urgently expiring, and unbelievably small.” You and I see the world with our own two eyes, and from that minuscule perspective, we tend to convince ourselves that we are (or at least should be) in control, directing our own lives, and scripting our future. We come back again to the truth that Philip Yancey reminded us of earlier in the chapter: “Prayer is the act of seeing reality from God’s point of view.” God is the one who calls us to “be still, and know that I am God.” Psalm 8 marvels at this very wonder:

A month later reports from NOAA and NASA begin to waffle. Maybe not this year after all, they say. The trade winds reappear—fitfully at first and then a warm steady breath of restored momentum. The various climate indicators dip back into neutral territory, and warnings are called off. The scientists take all this in stride, it being part of their profession to understand that there is in fact no such thing as a classic harbinger. It is simply necessary to realign one’s conclusions with the latest data at hand. There is, I learn, already a name for the sort of ENSO head-fake we have just been subjected to. Scientists call it “La Nada.

Every time they delayed a scheduled launch, they faced widespread public criticism and threats to funding. Each time they celebrated a flight that made it into orbit, they were encouraging their engineers to focus on the fact that the launch resulted in a success rather than on the faulty processes that could jeopardize future launches. That left NASA rewarding luck and repeating problematic practices, failing to rethink what qualified as an acceptable risk. It wasn’t for a lack of ability. After all, these were rocket scientists.

But those achievements pale next to the audacity of trying to send humans to Mars, which remains far beyond the present-day capability of NASA or any other space agency around the world. Even with an annual budget approaching $25 billion a year, and some of the smartest scientists and engineers anywhere, the space agency that landed humans on the Moon remains several giant leaps away from sending a few astronauts to Mars.

When I spoke to Laura Siahaan, business IT data scientist and team lead at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, she explained that a key aspect of her job involves communicating analytical findings to a non-technical audience. Hence, when interviewing data scientists, one of the main skills she looks for is the ability to explain complex data science concepts in a simple and precise manner. She highlighted the ability to tell a story using data as a differentiator among candidates.  Translating complex findings into actionable insights can be a daunting task at times, but having this skill set in your back pocket will make your work rewarding.

As part of NASA’s Child Star program, a student asked NASA scientists a question so seemingly rudimentary that the assistance of a “literal” rocket scientist in answering it felt more than a little unnecessary. “What is gravity?” the student asked. Shockingly, the NASA scientists shrugged: NASA scientist 1: “We don’t really know: We can define what it is as a field of influence because we know how it operates in the universe.” NASA scientist 2: “Actually, some scientists think that it is made up of particles called gravitons which travel at the speed of light.” NASA scientist 1: “However, if we are to be honest, we do not know what gravity ‘is’ in any fundamental way—we only know how it behaves.”19

The world, its leaders and its citizens, effectively knew nothing of the threat until the hot June day in 1988 when a mid-career NASA scientist named James Hansen testified before a Senate committee that “the greenhouse effect has been detected and it is changing our climate now.

Although the results may convince a wider audience, the “core set”—the working engineers and scientists most closely associated with the technology—understand the precariousness of this closure, for they are most intimately aware of the test result that does not conform to the others, the limitations of design, the ambiguity surrounding the various engineering interpretations that are embedded in day-to-day engineering work.

End of denazification The Allies also made exceptions as a matter of expediency. For example, 765 German rocket scientists and engineers, who only months before had been developing Hitler’s devastating secret weapons, were spirited away in the night to work for NASA without having to submit to the denazification process. The Russians did the same. In many cases the men’s families were also granted visas in order to mollify those who were to contribute to the space race. National security evidently took priority over all other considerations.

And what happens when you drop a life-form into an alien environment? NASA scientists wondered the same thing before the first space flights. The human body had been built to thrive under the pressure of gravity, so maybe taking away that pressure would act as an escape-trajectory Fountain of Youth, leaving the astronauts feeling stronger, smarter, and healthier. After all, every calorie they ate would now go toward feeding their brains and bodies, instead of pushing up against that relentless downward pull—right? Not by a long shot; by the time the astronauts returned to earth, they’d aged decades in a matter of days. Their bones were weaker and their muscles had atrophied; they had insomnia, depression, acute fatigue, and listlessness. Even their taste buds had decayed. If you’ve ever spent a long weekend watching TV on the sofa, you know the feeling, because down here on earth, we’ve created our own zero-gravity bubble; we’ve taken away the jobs our bodies were meant to do, and we’re paying for it. Nearly every top killer in the Western world—heart disease, stroke, diabetes, depression, hypertension, and a dozen forms of cancer—was unknown to our ancestors. They didn’t have medicine, but they did have a magic bullet—or maybe two, judging by the number of digits Dr. Bramble was holding up.

NASA's working assumption until then had been that, hardcore space groupies apart, people would only feel an imaginative investment in space if astronauts were involved, acting as a kind of representative human presence and giving the onlookers somewhere to situate themselves in relation to what they were seeing. Astronauts warmed space up, in media terms. They made it consequential. They provided the marker of human intent without which (it was assumed) any location would be just a set of affectless co-ordinates out there in the vacuum. The unmanned science missions to the planets were for scientists only, not for the general public whose emotions swayed space budgets. But when Pathfinder bounced safely to rest in Ares Vallis, and the six-wheeled rover Sojourner trundled out onto the boulder-studded plain like a big, cute, self-propelling roller skay, NASA discovered it had a spontaneous hit on its hands. It turned out people were willing for a robot to act as their surrogate on another world, so long as they could feel intimately connected to what it was doing.

NASA's Mars rover Perseverance landing guided by Swati Mohan || The Supreme Pontiff of Hinduism, Jagatguru Mahasannidhanam Bhagavan Nithyananda Paramashivam, on behalf of KAILASA - the Enlightened Civilizational Nation and 2 Billion Hindus worldwide congratulates and blesses Swati Mohan, an Indian MIT scientist who was responsible as guidance, navigation and controls operations lead for NASA's Mars rover Perseverance successful landing.

This book is a collection of answers to hypothetical questions. These questions were submitted to me through my website, where—in addition to serving as a sort of Dear Abby for mad scientists—I draw xkcd, a stick-figure webcomic. I didn’t start out making comics. I went to school for physics, and after graduating, I worked on robotics at NASA. I eventually left NASA to draw comics full-time, but my interest in science and math didn’t fade. Eventually, it found a new outlet: answering the Internet’s weird—and sometimes worrying—questions.

Remember the BoGo flashlight? While developing the prototype, Mark Bent ran into a problem: his device could not illuminate a whole room in the same way as a kerosene lamp. So he turned to InnoCentive, challenging its crowd to find a way to disperse the light. Within three months, an engineer in New Zealand came up with a design that allowed the BoGo to double as a lamp while also putting less strain on its rechargeable batteries. Tapping the crowd through InnoCentive often forges partnerships that would once have been unthinkable. When NASA asked for help improving the packaging used to preserve food on space missions, the winning solution—using graphite foil—came from a Russian scientist.

Nobody knew how to navigate through more than 200,000 miles of empty space between Earth and the moon. Experts at NASA had to imagine it, creating a mental model of space navigation and the tools that would enable it to happen. It wasn’t simply that a compass would not work—the whole idea of north and south makes no sense in space. Similarly, engineers had little experience with building motors that would work in the cold, airless vacuum of space—and could be started and restarted at the press of a button. So they constructed the rocket based on mental models of how engines work, not just in our planet’s atmosphere but also in space. Testing helped, of course, but mainly to validate what scientists had already conjured up in their minds.

It is the first book, maybe the only book to talk about how the problem of climate change can be addressed in a positive sense." - Dr. David Schimel, Senior Research Scientist, Jet Propulsion Lab NASA

It is the first book, maybe the only book to talk about how the problem of climate change can be addressed in a positive sense.

A mountain on Mars may have built up over time from lake sediments, according to NASA scientists who have been studying observations from the Curiosity rover scouring the Red Planet. The latest analysis is based on rocks discovered at the lower edges of Mount Sharp, which is located, rather oddly, in the midst of a crater on Earth’s neighbouring planet. While scientists are still not sure how long Mars was wet for any given spell through history, a “great surprise” was finding slanted rocks and soil that point to the existence of a lake bed in the crater, said Curiosity project scientist John Grotzinger of the California Institute of Technology. Curiosity’s pictures and data collected from the Martian soil in the lowest sedimentary layers of Mount Sharp has helped scientists see the remnants of how rivers once carried sand and silt to the lake, depositing sediment at the mouth of the river. This process would have repeated itself again and again to form a delta. Billions of years ago, the planet is believed to have been much warmer, with a thicker atmosphere that would have supported liquid water and potentially some form of life. — AFP

I owe Kent Joosten of the Johnson Space Center, NASA, even more gratitude than usual for his contribution to the cephalopod sections. Thanks also to Eric Brown and Simon Bradshaw for reading manuscript drafts. • The idea that squid and other cephalopods may be intelligent is real. A recent reference is New Scientist of 7 June 1997; Cephalopod Behaviour by R. T. Hanlon and J. B. Messenger (Cambridge University Press, 1996) was a valuable source. • The riches available to us from the asteroids and other extraterrestrial resources, and plans to exploit those riches, are real. A good recent survey is Mining the Sky by John S. Lewis (Addison Wesley, 1996). • The probabilistic doomsday prediction called here the “Carter catastrophe” is real. It has been well expressed by John Leslie in The End of the World (Routledge, 1996). • The “Feynman radio” idea of using advanced electromagnetic waves to pick up messages from the future is real. This has actually been attempted, for example by I. Schmidt and R. Newman (Bulletin of the American Physical Society, vol. 25, p. 581, 1979). And the extension of the idea to quantum mechanics (the “transactional interpretation”) is real. See John Cramer, Reviews of Modern Physics, vol. 58, p. 647, 1986. • Cruithne, Earth’s “second Moon,” is real. Its peculiar properties were reported in Nature, vol. 387, p. 685, 1997. • The “quark-nugget” idea of collapsed matter, with its potentially disastrous implications, is real. It was proposed by E. Witten in “Cosmic Separation of Phases,” Physical Review D, vol. 30, p. 272, 1984. • The physics of the possible far future drawn here is real. A classic reference is “Time without End: Physics and Biology in an Open Universe,” F. Dyson, Review of Modern Physics, vol. 51, p. 447, 1979. • The idea that our universe is one of an evolutionary family is real. A recent variant of the theory has been developed by L. Smolin in his book The Life of the Cosmos (Oxford University Press, 1997). • The notion of vacuum decay is real. It was explored by P. Hut and M. Rees in “How Stable Is Our Vacuum?” Nature, vol. 302, p. 508, 1983. The rest is fiction.

The aphorism “The map is not the territory” looms ever larger as I get lost in the intricacies of a culture, giving up any hope of understanding, while love and appreciation between us grows. —ELDON HAINES, 70, NASA PLANETARY SCIENTIST, OREGON