Check out Mars in the Sky tonight!

If you have a clear sky tonight and the next few nights try to get a good look at Mars, from Space.com:

On Thursday night, March 25, many people may look up at the sky and ask the question, "What's that bright star next to the moon?"The answer for Thursday night is Mars, but that answer changes night by night as the moon travels along the ecliptic, the path the sun, moon and planets follow across the sky. If you ask the question again on Monday night, March 29, the answer will be the ringed planet Saturn.Such conjunctions of the moon and planets are regular reminders of how rapidly the moon moves across the sky.

Mars was in opposition to the Sun on Jan. 29, when it appeared 14 arcseconds in diameter, 1/120 of the diameter of the moon. Two months later, it is much farther away, and has shrunk to only 10 arcseconds in diameter.This will be your last chance to get a good look at Mars until it approaches the Earth again in 2012 [see more Mars photos].

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• Last Chance to Get a Good Look at Mars Until 2012 (space.com)

Martian Moon Pics

Wired.com has an awesome pic of the Martian Moon, from the article:



The sharpest images yet taken by the Mars Express spacecraft of Mars’ tiny moon Phobos reveal features as small as 14.5 feet across, the European Space Agency announced March 15.

The Mars Express flybys, which happen every five months, may also determine if Phobos is a fragile pile of rocky fragments stuck together — what planetary scientists refer to as a rubble pile — or solid through and through, says Mars Express scientist Gerhard Neukum of the Free University of Berlin.

Read More http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/03/mars-phobos-flyby/#ixzz0iMxw7Qdg

Science fiction movies and television make it look so easy to travel about in space when in reality it is very difficult and impressive the strides we have made. I just wish as much money were spent on space studies vs. war and weapons. Maybe one day......

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• Closest Ever Look at Martian Moon (wired.com)

The Martian Child (2007)

The Martian Child is a movie based on the novelette by the same name and written by David Gerrold. As an aside note, Gerrold wrote a great episode of Star Trek entitle The Trouble with Tribbles! Back to the movie, it is an interesting story about a science fiction writer who decides to adopt a boy that thinks he is from Mars. You are left to decide if the boy is trying to cope with being abandoned or he is from Mars, you can let your imagination run wild with this story. The movie differs greatly from the novelette in that the main character of the book is an openly gay man who decides to adopt a boy and of course, Hollywood feels the need to make him heterosexual with a female love interest so the audience, I guess, does not feel uncomfortable. I feel if you are going to make a movie based on an award winning book, the core elements of the story should be kept in the movie script especially since the story is semi-autobiographical. In my opinion, people need to get over themselves and realize there are gay men and women in all corners of the world, in all sorts of professions, and the fact that some want to give a good home life to a child, and have the means and desire to do so, is a good thing.
Anyway, the movie is touching and fun to watch.

Alien First Contact

First contact with alien creatures is the core of science fiction literature, movies, and television; and the kind of aliens we encounter range from benevolent beings to acid for blood reptilian-like monsters. While we love to read or watch science fiction aliens, scientists actually theorize what an alien life-form could look like and how we would react to an actual face to face meeting.

Scientists feel that there are two possibilities, one being we will visit aliens from the "neighborhood" or we will be in verbal contact with a more distant alien civilization.

The article explains that if we contact alien life in our solar system:

If first contact turns out to be within our solar system, then at least we have some prior knowledge about the available habitats. Several spots might be suitable for Earth-like life based on carbon biochemistry and using water as a solvent. The subsoil of Mars may be warm enough to host microbes akin to Earth's bacteria, for example, and there could be larger beasts swimming in the watery oceans of some outer moons of the solar system - especially Jupiter's moon Europa. There's every chance that a deep aquatic ocean lies beneath Europa's ice, stretching right down to the moon's rock core, where volcanic vents pump out hot, nutrient-rich water.

Then the article goes on to explain how the aliens we talk to may exist:

And then there is the fact that in order to contact us, ET must be able to send and receive radio waves or laser beams, or use some other medium to reach across the light years. So either they are vast creatures that have evolved natural radio-wave organs to talk and listen to each other, or they have developed technology. For that, intelligence alone is not enough. "The thing that advances us as a species is that we are social," says Schulze-Makuch. "One of us alone is not very smart - I'm so dumb I can't even build a radio. It is by working together that we got on the moon."
So message-sending aliens will probably have some form of society. It need not be anything like human societies, however. "There are meta-intelligences in the societies of bees and termites. I can imagine something like a termite or ant colony that gets really intelligent," says Schulze-Makuch. This does not tell us, however, whether they will be furry, scaly or slimy. Even on Earth, clever brains come in a wide variety of packages: dolphins and primates, parrots and crows, sea otters, honey badgers, octopuses and squid.

If you love science fiction or just the idea of making contact with an alien species, I suggest reading the entire article, it is well worth the time, it will change your perception of what an alien is and how we might contact each other.

Here is a link to the full article.