Within or Without

joncarling:

right before the war

jtotheizzoe:

theamericankid:

Where do astronauts hang out?

Well played.

I awoke to find the zit fading! GOOD FRIDAY!

jtotheizzoe:

A Vision For Tomorrow - To Boldly Go

What if we could build a ship that could take hundreds of people to the moon in just three days? How about Mars in 90 days? What if we had a telescope more powerful than the Hubble, that could be moved wherever we wanted? How about being able to deliver probes, science equipment and landers to the entire near solar system within a few years?

This guy thinks it can be done. More specifically, not only can it be done, it should be done. BuildTheEnterprise.org (an extremely deeply detailed website, btw) is a 20 year plan to build a $1 trillion space cruiser. It could have ion drives, a rotating gravity disk, crew quarters for hundreds of scientists and tourists. It would probably have one of those machines where you could call order any food you wanted and it would materialize in front of you. And it would look exactly like the Enterprise from Star Trek.

Of course, it doesn’t have to look like the ship from the sci-fi series. Why not make it look like something else? Maybe something more … traditional? Think about this: if that world and those adventures have been able to capture the imaginations of the world, young and old, for decades … what better inspiration could we ask for? The schematics and build schedules call for $50 billion a year over 20 years, which is a drop in the bucket of our national budget. It would transform economies and unite the world’s innovators to create this ship - the pinnacle of human achievement.

But most of all, it would serve as a bridge between our dreams and reality, and a seed for the scientific dreamers of tomorrow.

It’s part thought experiment, part pipe dream, part social statement and part why don’t we just give this a shot already??? The project has a funding plan, complete conceptual designs, and ship specs. More than you can say for a lot of Kickstarter projects.

It’s nice to dream a dream like this, based in a vision of the future that’s not as far off as your first glance makes it seem.

Bonus: The time that they almost built a life-sizeEnterprise in Las Vegas. Morons. YOU SHOULD HAVE.

(via BuildTheEnterprise; This artwork was done by me, and is proof that I shouldn’t be given access to Illustrator and booze after dark)

jtotheizzoe:

Dear Einstein, Do Scientists Pray?

A young girl named Phyllis wrote to Einstein in 1936 on behalf of her Sunday School class, asking if scientists pray. He wrote her back.

An excerpt from his response (read the whole letter here):

… everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that some spirit is manifest in the laws of the universe, one that is vastly superior to that of man. In this way the pursuit of science leads to a religious feeling of a special sort, which is surely quite different from the religiosity of someone more naive.

To me, he is capturing that combined, intangible feeling of curiosity and discovery. I think he viewed the awareness that our world is ruled by natural laws as a constant “spirit” in itself, and one that he could access at will. Maybe not traditional religion, but an idea that I think we can all agree is worth exploring.

(↬ Letters of Note)

theniftyfifties:

Marlon Brando

theniftyfifties:

Rock Hudson, 1953.

(Source: valentinovamp)

theniftyfifties:

Marilyn Monroe

I’ll have what SHE is having!!