HackingTheUniverse

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A voltaic pile is a group of galvanic cells that are joined together as a circuit in series, forming an electric battery. While it is possible that primitive batteries were in use for several thousand years prior, Alessandro Volta, assembled the first well documented working battery. Volta was following up on Luigi Galvani’s famous experiment [...]

The history of navigation tools is about clocks, compasses and sextants. Navigating requires knowledge about where you are and where you want to go. Early navigation probably involved short, local trips, where there was no need to know your precise location and only a direction was needed to aim for some destination. This could be [...]

Use the slide bar below the picture frame to move across the scale range and explore groups of objects found in similar size ranges. From strings and quantum foam at the low end to measuring galactic superclusters in “yottameters” (10^24th meters) and whatever is beyond the limits of our vision in time. Scale of the [...]

3D printers work by extruding materials in patterns and building up layers of the material into three dimensional objects. The greatest cost of building structures in space is simply lifting the mass of the materials up out of the gravity well we live in. If materials to build with can be provided in space without [...]

Buckyballs are carbon molecules that contain 60 atoms of carbon, arranged in a three dimensional sphere. The surface of the sphere is composed of combinations of hexagons and pentagons, giving it an appearance that is similar to a soccer ball. They were originally named buckminsterfullerene after Buckminster Fuller who pioneered work on geodesic domes but [...]

The goal of space colonization is to colonize space, not to climb out of the gravity well of our planet only to climb back down into the gravity well of another planet and start building there. The goal is to learn to live in space and the future of space colonization will be directed toward [...]

In 2009, NASA announced that the Spitzer telescope in space had detected a previously unknown giant ring around Saturn. The inner radius of the vaporous ring is 6 million kilometers from Saturn and the outer radius is 12 million kilometers out. The thickness or vertical height of the ring is estimated to be around 2.4 [...]

The Skylon spaceplane design has the ability to take off as an airplane and reach orbit as a rocket driven craft. The engines use oxygen from the air while the plane is climbing through the atmosphere, then switch to liquid oxygen from a fuel tank as it moves into space. Skylon spaceplane gathers momentum – [...]

On Sunday, August 1, 2010, the side of the Sun facing the Earth erupted with a “coronal mass ejection” and a lot of other activity. This is a when a huge bubble of gas throws a large blob of plasma out into space and in this case it’s streaming toward Earth at a very high [...]

If our Solar System and planet Earth are typical of the universe, then considering how many galaxies and how many stars there are, the place should be teeming with intelligent life. (see the link to the Drake Equation below that discusses this) The Fermi Paradox is that in spite of this logical reasoning that there [...]