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Mankind will need to venture far beyond planet Earth to ensure the long-term survival of our species, according to the world's best known scientist, Professor Stephen Hawking. Stephen Hawking says space is his next goal Returning to a theme he has voiced many times before, the Cambridge University cosmologist said today that space-rockets propelled by the kind of matter/antimatter annihilation technology popularised in Star Trek would be needed to help Homo sapiens colonise hospitable planets orbiting alien stars. And he disclosed his own ambition to go into space. "Maybe Richard Branson will help me," he said, a reference to the...

LONDON (AFP) - As the guitar power in the legendary British rock band Queen, Brian May conquered most of the planet -- and now he has his sights set on mastering the universe. The star musician, who wrote hits like "We Will Rock You", "The Show Must Go On" and "Flash", has switched his plectrum for a pen and co-authored a book with two leading British astronomers, telling the story of the big bang and how the universe has evolved since. Brian May addresses the media during a photocall to launch a book entitled "Bang! The Complete History of the...

How an alternate theory of the universe exposes the 'war of words' that underlies modern cosmology. Theoretical physicists have recently been frustrated by a bold hypothesis concerning black holes—specifically, that they don't exist. In March, at the 22nd Pacific Coast Gravity Meeting in Santa Barbara, Calif., George Chapline, an applied physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, gave a talk based on ideas he's been incubating for several years. His goal: to amend astrophysics by applying theories of dark energy and condensed matter physics. His work reinvents black holes as so-called "dark energy stars," which are what is left over when...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- More than 9,000 pieces of space debris are orbiting the Earth, a hazard that can only be expected to get worse in the next few years, according to NASA scientists. And currently there's no workable and economic way to clean up the mess.

In Egyptian myth, Apophis was the ancient spirit of evil and destruction, a demon that was determined to plunge the world into eternal darkness. A fitting name, astronomers reasoned, for a menace now hurtling towards Earth from outerspace. Scientists are monitoring the progress of a 390-metre wide asteroid discovered last year that is potentially on a collision course with the planet, and are imploring governments to decide on a strategy for dealing with it.

Kennedy had gotten involved in the revolution in Vietnam and left the resulting mess to Johnson, who got sucked in deeper and deeper. LBJ was in a terrible dilemma. He knew he couldn’t win in Vietnam, but he also knew he couldn’t quit, because the political consequences of losing were too great. So the stalemate in Vietnam just kept getting worse, and more and more expensive. Johnson didn’t want to give up his Great Society programs, and he didn’t want to raise taxes, so he absolutely had to cut everything else—and the space race was a big fat money pot....

HAT CREEK, Calif. -- Astronomer Michael M. Davis checked his computer. One of the antennas on the state-of-the-art radio telescope being built in the valley outside his office was picking up an unusual pulse from beyond the Earth. A signal from another intelligent civilization? Not today. It was the Rosetta Satellite, en route to study a comet. Hopeful moments followed by disappointments like this are par for the course for researchers at the SETI Institute, the privately funded successor to the now defunct government project dedicated to searching for alien life. They have been searching the heavens for decades, but...

China takes U.S. plans to boost its space military capabilities very seriously and is likely to respond with energetic counter-measures of her own, a leading expert on the Chinese space program told United Press International. Chinese experts and leaders say that if the United States achieves absolute military and strategic superiority in space it could be used to intervene in China's affairs, such as the Taiwan issue. Chinese leaders have noted that the Taiwan issue was included as a hypothetical threat in the 2001 Rumsfeld Commission report on space weaponization. Zhang said such weapons would pose a huge threat to...

America's plans for humans to explore space may cause it to relax its laws on weapons proliferation HERE'S a wizard idea. Spend $40 billion building a big tin can in orbit round the Earth, in order—at least in part—to keep the rocket scientists of your former enemy from going to work for your current enemies. Then find that a law intended to stop the current enemies getting their hands on such rocket scientists' knowledge means you can no longer use this expensive tin can. Confused? You are not the only one. Because that, in a nutshell, is what is...

New Delhi is in the middle of a big secret internal debate. On one side the largest democracy of the world is eager to explain to its citizens and to the world about the ongoing contacts with the UFOs and extra-terrestrials. On the other hand there are invisible untold international protocols that prohibit doing anything that may cause worldwide fear and panic. It is well accepted between the UFO and extra-terrestrial experts that all the five nuclear powers are in contact with the beings from other stars for quite some time. Recently India has seen enormous news on UFO contacts...

now im not a betting man, but i know landrovers and there space caps are not made of wood. This clearly looks like a wooden plank to me. Unless someone hacked Nasa.gov's website and put up a photoshop'ed photo, this looks kinda odd.

According to Subhra Jain, a freelance reporter in New Delhi, she bumped into a very senior Indian Military official in a nightclub in New Delhi. While talking what she came to know will make the rest of the world sit up all night. According to her, Extra Terrestrials have been visiting India and the rest of the world for thousands of years. In recent days most of the super powers have been formally contacted. India is no exception in recent days. ’They always contact through the ground radar stations of the military’, she says. Indian Himalayas and Ladakh (China-India) border...

The late Carl Sagan once asked this question, “What does it mean for a civilization to be a million years old? We have had radio telescopes and spaceships for a few decades; our technical civilization is a few hundred years old... an advanced civilization millions of years old is as much beyond us as we are beyond a bush baby or a macaque.” Although any conjecture about such advanced civilizations is a matter of sheer speculation, one can still use the laws of physics to place upper and lower limits on these civilizations. In particular, now that the laws of...

I once thought that worrying about what we should broadcast to extraterrestrials made as much sense as fretting over the small talk I’d venture with King Carl XVI Gustaf if I won the Nobel Prize. I reckoned there was no need to dwell on the problem, as it was both hypothetical and irrelevant.

LAKELAND, FLA. - Urban legends are supposed to be legends and that's all. But if you ask Jennifer Ward about the Florida skunk ape, she will tell you it stepped out of the mists of myth and into reality. "I never thought anything like that was out there before," Ward, 30, said recently. "But I know there is now." Ward's encounter with the hairy creature came in August, about a week after Hurricane Charley, along a rural stretch of road as she was driving home from a friend's house. Her daughters were asleep in the back seat and it was...

BOISE - UFOs are showing a keen interest in our nuclear weapons facilities, says investigator Robert Hastings, who has spent countless hours analyzing documents dealing with UFO sightings at nuclear missile launch sites and research labs in the United States over the past several decades. "You have reference to these objects hovering, racing away at blinding speed," he told Idaho 2 News. "There is no evidence we have an aircraft that can do that or anyone else on earth." Hastings, who has devoted countless hours researching UFOs and the U.S. government's reaction to them, was in Boise for a lecture...

It may be a work of art. It may have some more useful purpose. Or maybe it's some combination of the two. But Dwayne Romine would like to know for sure. He and his 12-year-old son, Greg, were looking for deer tracks on some family property near Indianola recently when the older Romine spotted something a little unusual in the ground. "I said 'look at that, a piece of rusted metal'," he recalled. "Greg said, 'Naw, that's just an old tree branch,' but I said 'No it's not.' "Sure enough, when we pulled it up, it was metal." That alone...

Using current and Developing technology we can land a crew on the planet Mars in 2015 http://www.exploremarsnow.org/

Dark Matter Halo Puzzles Astronomers Summary - (Oct 26, 2004) Astronomers using the Chandra X-Ray Observatory have discovered a huge halo of dark matter around an isolated elliptical galaxy; an object that shouldn't have such a halo, according to optical observations. The galaxy, NGC 4555, is unusual that it's a large elliptical galaxy which isn't part of a larger cluster of galaxies. It's surrounded by a cloud of gas, twice the size of the galaxy itself, that's been heated to 10-million-degrees Celsius. This gas could only get that hot if it was being constrained by a halo of dark matter...

LONDON, England (Reuters) -- An unexplained radio signal from deep space could -- just might be -- contact from an alien civilization, New Scientist magazine reported on Thursday. The signal, coming from a point between the Pisces and Aries constellations, has been picked up three times by a telescope in Puerto Rico. There are other explanations besides extraterrestrial contact that may explain the signal. New Scientist said the signal could be generated by a previously unknown astronomical phenomenon or even be a by-product from the telescope itself. But the mystery beam has excited astronomers across the world. "If they can...