Tag: NASA

GODZILLAAAAAAAAAA! Etc.

On By Dan HarrisIn Random, Reading, Sci-Fi and FantasyLeave a comment

Bryan Cranston? Check. Guy from Kick Ass? Check. Really, really big lizard? Check.

But a lizard so big that repeatedly being hit by nuclear detonations back in the 50s didn’t kill it? Really? I can get behind the idea of a thousand foot tall monster laying waste to Tokyo, but let’s be realistic.

In other news, NASA reported that they found a bunch of new planets. A big bunch. 715 more on top of the 1000 we already knew about. Only four are in the so-called Goldilocks zone–not too hot, not too cold, just right for us finicky humans–but that’s still quite a find. Now we just need a vast amount of money, resources and political will to go and investigate them, and we’ll be colonising the stars in no time!

Over at the Wertzone there’s a great list of female fantasy authors, who apparently Waterstones have never heard of despite being a major bookseller.

And there’s an interesting and well-written article on Tor comparing Sherlock, which I love, with Elementary, which I’ve never seen. Some really good points.

Last up: BATMAN VS. THE TERMINATOR.

30 years have passed since Bruce Wayne survived Skynet’s nuclear blasts in August of ’97. Iron demons now roam the planet, and without the requirement to defend the innocent against crime and injustice, Wayne has seeked refuge in the bomb shelter that saved his life; the Batcave.

Having scavenged the wasteland for resources, he discovers the radio of a dead soldier. There is static over a frequency. Flesh and blood is rising up to the west. With The Stinger; a riot control vehicular unit built before the apocalypse along with a refitted bomb blast vest, Batman makes his way across what remains of the United States to join forces with the man determined to neutralize the electronic menace – John Connor.

Fantastic.

I’m Baaaaaaack

On By Dan HarrisIn Random, Reading, Sci-Fi and Fantasy, WritingLeave a comment

[Silence. After a few moments, footsteps are heard. Faintly at first, but then louder as they approach. A man appears from stage left. His stride stutters for a moment as he glances toward the darkened auditorium, but he gathers himself and steps confidently to the microphone.]

*cough*

[He taps the microphone twice. Feedback whines through the auditorium’s speaker system, and the man winces. He moistens his lips and peers out at the shadowed space where the audience might be.]

“So. I’ve… been away for a while.”

Silence.

“I don’t know if anybody’s out there, but… well. Let’s just pick up where we left off, shall we?”

Continue reading “I’m Baaaaaaack” →

Sun Goes Mental, No One Really Knows Why

On By Dan HarrisIn RandomLeave a comment

Late Sunday night, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory recorded the first ‘X-class’–i.e. really powerful–solar flare of 2013. Which was cool, and they’d been expecting it, so no biggie.

But then there were another two. In the next 23 hours. From the same spot on the Sun. Should we be scared? Has our reliable old star entered some kind of monsoon season that comes every 10,000 years, auguring the apocalypse and end of all humanity?

Seems not. Although “An X-class flare in our direction, combined with a colossal, interplanetary CME (coronal mass ejection), could have serious consequences here on Earth.”

And “X-class flares and their associated coronal mass ejections can lead to mindblowing northern lights at very non-northern latitudes… [and] can also trigger massive geomagnetic storms, jam satellites, ground airplanes, and precipitate global radio blackouts.”

Space, eh? It’s like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re going to get.

More at io9.

In The (SFF) News This Week…

On By Dan HarrisIn Random, Reading, Sci-Fi and Fantasy, Self-Publishing, Writing3 Comments

A super-nerdy but awesome explanation of the Kardashev scale, which is ‘used to classify hypothetical alien civilizations according to the amount of energy at their disposal’.

‘This led him to speculate about a Type II civilization. For an [extraterrestrial intelligence] to reach K2, it would need to capture the entire energy output of its parent star. The best way to achieve this, of course, is to build a Dyson Sphere.

Conjured by Freeman Dyson in 1959, this hypothetical megastructure would envelope a star at a distance of 1 AU and cover an inconceivably large area of 2.72 x 1017 km2, which is around 600 million times the surface area of the Earth. The sun has an energy output of around 4 x 1026 Watts, of which most would be available to do useful work.’

As anyone who’s read Ascension Point knows, I’ve always been more of a Dyson Swarm kind of guy, but each to their own.

Next up, are you ready for season three of Game of Thrones? I know I am.

We should stop using nuclear weapons as a unit of measurement, says annoyed atomic historian.

“In general,” he added, “What I don’t like is … the idea that kiloton or a megaton is just an energy unit, that it’s equivalent to so many joules or something. Because you could do that. You could claim that your house runs so many tons of TNT worth of electricity per year, but it sort of trivializes the notion.”

Also at The Atlantic, a spectacular NASA video of three simultaneous solar phenomena.

‘…a solar flare, a coronal mass ejection (CME), and coronal rain, “complex moving structures in association with changes in magnetic field lines that loop up into the sun’s atmosphere,” NASA explains.’

Finally, in Dan-specific news, Venus Rising goes to my editor on March 8th, which means it should be out in just a couple of months!

Freaky Solar System

On By Dan HarrisIn Sci-Fi and Fantasy, WritingLeave a comment

Wow.

“This newly discovered system is called Kepler-36, and it’s about 1,200 light years away. One of its planets is a rocky super-Earth about 1.5 times the size of our planet and 4.5 times the mass. Its companion, a Neptune-like gaseous planet, is 3.7 times the size of Earth and eight times the mass. And they’re very close to each other – about 30 times closer than any pair of planets in our solar system.

Because their orbital distance varies by only 10%, the view of the Neptune-like planet from the rocky planet must at times be pretty spectacular.”

I’m pretty impressed they got a photo, too. Oh, wait…

This could dramatically change how I create solar systems in my books; it simply never occurred to me to have very different planets that close to each other. Thanks, science!

Full article on io9 here.