Author Archives: Johann West

The Future of Space Travel – The Skyhook

Infrastructure is everywhere. Most every way of transport that we consider using regularly has immense infrastructure. Cars have roads, trains have rails and stations, and airplanes have airports and runways. But with space travel, we take the brute force method, spending immense amounts of money and forcing a rocket to defy gravity and get itself …

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The Fermi Paradox : Are We Alone?

The Fermi Paradox Picture The universe is magnificently huge, and hence should have countless opportunities for life to develop, but that then begs the question, where are all the aliens? Due to the expansion of the universe being faster than the speed of life, there may be life throughout many galaxies, or even most of …

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Asteroid Mining

Picture of Asteroid With the current rise of privatized space travel, one industry that may very well likely be popularized within our lifetimes is asteroid mining. However the initial investment cost of getting to a profitable asteroid will be enormous, the payoff of mining and bringing back the metals that these asteroids contain would be …

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Possibility of Life on Europa

Picture from European Space Agency As of now scientists believe there are three requirements for a planet to develop and sustain life. Liquid water, the appropriate chemical elements, and an energy source. Europa has more than enough water, as it is believed that below the roughly 15 miles of solid ice, lies twice as much …

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Born from the Stars

It may be hard to believe, but in all technicality, everything in the solar system, including humans, are born from star dust. Let’s start at the beginning, at the big bang. The matter released from the big bang made up the first generation of stars, only containing the elements hydrogen and helium. Eventually, when the …

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Unmanned Spacecraft and AI

There are 4 types of unmanned space craft that are used to collect data: flybys, orbiters, landers, and sample return mission spacecraft. Flybys simply pass by a celestially object, and are generally the cheapest as they usually require no fuel propulsion after leaving Earth’s orbit. Flybys mostly observe through the use of telescopes and other …

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What makes the Tides happen?

This blog will be referencing information sourced from the Tides: Crash Course Astronomy #8 video. We know that mass has gravity, and more mass had more gravity. This raises the question, why does the moon have a greater impact on the Earth’s tides than the Sun, even though the Sun has such a greater gravitational …

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Historical Astronomers in Context (Galileo Galilei)

Galileo Galilei Born February 15, 1564  Died January 8, 1642  2. Galileo Galilei has been called the father of observational astronomy, modern physics, the scientific method, and modern science itself. He was influential in the field of astronomy due to his contributions which included telescopic confirmation of the phases of Venus, observation of satellites around …

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Powers of Ten and the scale of the Universe

After reaching a scale of 10^24 meters, the camera zooms back in all the way to a single proton, which is visible and in frame at a scale of 10^-16 meters. 10^+16 meters is roughly 10 light years. With these two numbers, it also frames humans as obviously very large in comparison to a proton, …

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Introductory Post! -Johann West

NASA Voyager Galleries

This is a photo of Neptune, my favorite planet in the solar system, besides Earth of course. It is my favorite planet for the simple reasons that I find it nice to look at, and Neptune is the Roman version of Poseidon, wh… Continue reading

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