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China fired up the largest radio telescope in the world earlier this week. The Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) is nearly double the size of the Arecibo observatory, and they didn't cease there. Far from creating a radio tranquillity zone that people could still live in, like we did in West Virginia, regime staked out a 5km radius of radio silence and displaced some 8,000 people for the "protection" of the telescope. Construction started in 2011 on the massive observatory, nicknamed Tianyan: the Eye of Heaven.

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We found out that Mercury is shrinking. Stress wrinkles in its surface, chosen scarps, testify the states where the planet'southward surface is cracking and settling fastest. Bluntly, this is mostly important considering it proves the null hypothesis: that Globe is not the only planet in the universe that has geological (Mercurological?) activeness. Not that our planet isn't a lovely and unique identify, simply it isn't special, in the sense that it isn't an exception.

There'due south some newly discovered stuff going on with Europa, as well: apparently information technology has cryovolcanoes like Enceladus. Why intendance about cryovolcanoes? Because they give us access to any'south below Europa's surface, which we think is a global subsurface bounding main. Drilling through miles and miles of crust isn't really plausible because it takes also long. Certain would be nice to have an Artesian well and then we could get some proficient readings without working too hard. You know, harder than sending a probe to Europa to begin with.

A Cassini image of Enceladus, showing the plumes thrown into space by cryovolcanoes

A Cassini paradigm of Enceladus, showing the plumes thrown into space past cryovolcanoes

In that location'southward a maxim: if you desire something done fast, requite it to a busy homo. Elon Musk has certainly been a busy man, and fast ± fire seems to be his thing lately. SpaceX peeled the plastic off their brandy-spankin'-new methane rocket, the Raptor: the one that could have humans to Mars. Mach diamonds, a visible standing wave in the frazzle plumage, are easy to come across in the Raptor'due south fiery tail.  It's a methane rocket because marsh gas is easier to brand with what at that place is on Mars; the idea is that the ship would tank up on Mars for the ride abode.

Musk has a plan to go to Mars: He wants to start within the next year or 2, and and then have a flight to Mars for every launch window between now and the 2020s — whereupon SpaceX should be ready to field the Interplanetary Transport Organization. This is all with an explicit intent to colonize Mars within our lifetime.

Raptor-TestFire

Mach diamonds.

All these things make me wonder, though: why are nosotros looking to other planets when there's and so much to deal with right here? Why Mars? Plumes or no plumes, why Europa? I don't claim to know the mind of Elon Musk. Just the argument for looking to Mars is to believe space travel is and should exist the future of humanity, whether for reasons of escape or because we're set up to outgrow the bounds of our home world. It's part of the same school of thought that wants to turn over every stone and wait under information technology, merely because there might be something worth knowing under it. How would we ever know if we didn't expect?