Humanity
milhayser | August 14, 2013Life has been growing on Earth for about 4 billion years, and during that time there have been a handful of mass extinctions that have wiped out a large percentage of complex lifeforms. Asteroid impact, volcanic eruption, climate change, anoxia, and poison have dispatched untold numbers of once-successful species to total oblivion or a few lucky fossils. Species also die off regularly for much less spectacular reasons, and altogether about 98% of documented species no longer exist.
Cry me a river, you say, without all that death there would have been no gap for vertebrates, for mammals, for…
milhayser | February 22, 2011
January 28th marked the 25th anniversary of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, when one of the rocket boosters separated from the external fuel tank after liftoff and aerodynamic forces tore the shuttle apart. Like millions of Americans, Ethan Siegel and Greg Laden watched the orbiter disintegrate live on TV. Ethan writes that while "we found and fixed the flaws that caused the accident, and returned to space 32 months later with the Space Shuttle Discovery," we "lost our eagerness for human space exploration in a way that would have been unfathomable 20 years prior." NASA shifted its…
drorzel | January 25, 2009In his inaugural address, President Obama pledged to "restore science to its rightful place." Following up on that, the Corporate Masters have launched the Rightful Place Project, asking bloggers, readers, and scientists to define the rightful place of science.
Many of these responses will focus on narrow matters of policy, but as many have said with regard to the economic crisis, this is no time for timid measures. It's a time for big thoughts and bold action. With that in mind, here's my take on the question of science's rightful place, which, in the end, boils down to defining what science…
chaoticutopia | September 11, 2007A few posts back, I indicated that I was finished with travelling, and ready to settle into my classes at CU Boulder. Naturally, chaos has a way of affecting plans made with certainty. Sure enough, as soon as I returned from New York, I found myself packing my suitcase once again, this time to head to Wyoming and South Dakota for my grandpa’s funeral. The timing wasn’t wonderful; I had to miss a day of class, and ended up spending part of my "vacation time" studying. That’s where the chaotic parts played in.
Of course, the subjects that I’m studying are intrinsically relevant to me,…
chaoticutopia | June 15, 2006I'd planned to spend the day discussing ancient rock art, but this isn't how I wanted to start. Earlier this month in Fruita, Colorado (located on the I-70 corridor on the western slope) a group of graduating high school seniors took a can of spray paint and marked their legacy on a couple of rocks outside of town. Kids will be kids, right? The trouble is, they weren't the first to leave a legacy on those rocks. Someone else had left their mark there, about a thousand years before.
Petroglyphs and pictograms, left by a people known collectively as the Fremont Culture, are scattered across…