There has been a lot of talk among some people that some of our moons, planets, comets and asteroids could actually be spaceships and some might be hollow inside. Many other people have said what a ridiculous idea this is. I can understand why most people might think this is a really silly idea, but it is said the best form of flattery is imitation and NASA has launched a study to see if it is practical to turn asteroids into spaceships. So let’s see what we have here. On one hand we are being told by NASA the idea that places like our moon or the moons of Mars might be spaceships brought here is crazy and on the other hand we see NASA launching a study to see if they can do just that, which is turn an asteroid into a spaceship and send it somewhere. The study is called Project RAMA which stands for Reconstituting Asteroids into Mechanical Automata. Some of the ideas proposed are to equip asteroids with enough mechanical devices to allow them to travel to the Earth-Moon libration point where they would be in a study orbit.  This would be the Asteroid Redirect Mission or ARM. The earth and moon have two libration points where if something is inserted it will stay stationary.

This may sound like a contradiction in terms, but we have just found a huge dwarf planet hiding in the area far beyond Pluto. The object is unnamed and is only slightly smaller than Pluto and Eris. There is still a lot to learn about our own solar system. It has only been a couple of weeks since we discovered a new moon around Pluto. We also found a galaxy which is orbiting the Milky Way. It is beyond me how this was missed. It does prove one thing however, there is a lot of undiscovered things out there and many could be in our own solar system. The dwarf planet was spotted in 2007, but we thought it was a far smaller and insignificant object and didn’t give it the proper attention or a name. The object has a diameter of almost 1,000 miles, 995 miles to be exact. One has to wonder with more planets being discovered, even dwarf ones, is the possibility of finding life in our solar system getting better. The truth is we really don’t know if a planet has to be in the golden zone (about where Earth is from the sun) to contain life, we only theorize this based on our own planet.

The Kepler telescope has found new alien worlds which seem to be entirely covered with oceans. It is being said they are unlike any planet in our solar system. Life on one of these worlds is said to be a possibility. The problem for us is this life would no doubt be living under water and hard to communicate with, even if we could get a timely signal that far. This world was found orbiting the star Kepler-62 along with another world in the habitable zone. The Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) suggests the second world is also covered by an ocean. The star they orbit is slightly smaller and cooler than our own sun. Both worlds are larger than earth. One is about 60% larger and the other about 40% larger. NASA seems to be telling us a lot about a world we cannot even see due to its distance from earth. They suggest one has a very cloudy sky and its warm and humid all the way to the Polar Regions. It is believed the other planet has some sort of greenhouse effect going or the oceans would turn to ice.

Some scientists are saying the discovery of gravitational waves might fulfill Einstein’s wish for a unified field theory by helping us prove string theory. String theory is very hard to explain. It is said to be a cosmological theory based on the existence of cosmic strings. Another definition says string theory is a theoretical framework in which the point-like particles of particle physics are replaced by one-dimensional objects called strings. The official string theory site asks us to think of a guitar string which has been tuned by stretching the string under tension across the guitar. Depending on how the string is plucked and how much tension is in the string, different musical notes will be created by the string. These notes could be said to be excitation modes of the guitar string under tension. Elementary particles in particle accelerators could be thought of as the notes or excitation modes of elementary strings. I probably didn’t clear up anything did I?

We have many names for the best distance for a planet to orbit its sun which gives it a chance of having life on it, but we are basing this on our own planet. Sometimes the area is called the Goldilocks zone, the sweet spot, the golden zone and many others, but as I said this is based on Earth’s position and the fact it contains life. Different types of life could have different needs. Maybe there is life out there which requires might higher or lower temperatures. Other types of life could need certain minerals or even certain plants. Let’s not forget we depend on plants to live, not only because we need them for food, but also because they create our air. Maybe the atmosphere on some other planet is created in some other manner and yet life adapted to it. We just don’t know.

Planets do not always need a star to make them warm. There could be internal heating caused by friction, radioactivity or some other cause. An example of this could be the Jovian moon Io. It has volcanic activity because it has a molten core. There could be millions of planets with molten cores throughout the universe and they may not be in the sweet spot. Even if this is true, some may have an atmosphere with enough warmth being generated by volcanoes and tidal forces to make the planet relatively warm. There could be life which wouldn’t last a second on a world like ours. On the other hand their worlds might seem inhospitable to us. We have a fascinating future ahead of us in space exploration and I am sure we are going to find things which we previously thought were impossible to exist.