Free Republic

Holy hell, that is a LOT of starships. This comparison chart, compiled by DeviantARTist Dirk Loechel, presents what he says is an accurate size-comparison between famous sci-fi starships. As far as I can tell it's got more or less every single sci-fi starship ever, from Star Wars to Warhammer to EVE Online to Halo and way, way beyond. In an update this month, Loechel added a ton more ships to what already must have been a huge collection.

Bostrom: From Extinction to Transcendence by Paul Gilster on February 27, 2013 At the top of my list of people IÂ’d someday like to have a long conversation with is Nick Bostrom, a philosopher and director of OxfordÂ’s Future of Humanity Institute. As Centauri Dreams readers will likely know, Bostrom has been thinking about the issue of human extinction for a long time, his ideas playing interestingly against questions not only about our own past but about our future possibilities if we can leave the Solar System. And as Ross Andersen demonstrates in Omens, a superb feature on BostromÂ’s...

Science fiction writers may have to rethink how their starship crews survive travel near or beyond the speed of light. Even the occasional hydrogen atom floating in the interstellar void would become a lethal radiation beam that would kill human crews in mere seconds and destroy a spacecraft's electronics, New Scientist reports. Just a few stray wisps of hydrogen gas -- fewer than two hydrogen atoms per cubic centimeter on average -- would translate into 7 teraelectron volts for a starship crew traveling at 99.999998 percent of the speed of light. That's as much fun for humans as standing in...

New observations of galaxies reveal perplexing concentrations in certain directions, astronomers said today. Galaxies along the sight-lines toward distant explosive gamma-ray bursts appear to be four times as abundant as in the directions of quasars. Gamma-ray bursts are massive eruptions of dying stars. Quasars are constantly bright objects are thought to involve supermassive black holes surrounded by developing galaxies. There is no known reason why foreground galaxies should have any association with these background light sources, researchers said. "The result contradicts our basic concepts of cosmology, and we are struggling to explain it," said Jason X. Prochaska, associate professor of...