On Tuesday, May 17, 2022, the first open congressional hearing in half a century was held on the topic of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP; previously termed UFOs). Witnesses included Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security, Ronald S. Moultrie, and Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence, Scott W. Bray. My…

Rockets are propelled forward by ejecting burnt gases backward through their exhaust. The same principle of global momentum conservation pushes an ice skater when separating from a partner, or triggers recoil when shooting a bullet. In 1897, the rocket scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky realized that the fuel mass required to propel…

In the late 1960s, the United States Government (USG) launched the Vela satellites to detect high-energy radiation, also known as gamma-rays, emitted by nuclear weapons tested in space. The USG was concerned that the Soviet Union might attempt to conduct secret nuclear tests after signing the Partial Nuclear Test Ban…

My message to Eric Weinstein stated: “We must push the extraterrestrial frontier of our knowledge or else we will not have the broader perspective to survive as a species.” He replied: “how excited do you want to get, Professor?”, to which I answered: “as excited as reality is.” Eric was…

When old people forget names, they apologize for having a “senior moment”. And when innovation by young people is dismissed by the “adults in the room”, the youngsters face a “junior moment”. …

In a recent WORLDS.MINDS forum organized by Rolf Dobelli, a speaker commented that he plans his life so that the speech delivered about his lifelong accomplishments at his funeral will be to his liking. This guiding principle makes little sense to me. First, when I die — I would care…

In 2020, the Physics Nobel Prize was awarded to Andrea Ghez and Reinhard Genzel for confirming the existence of a massive black hole, Sagittarius A* (abbreviated Sgr A*), at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. The motion of stars at a few percent of the speed of light at…

Imagine the New Horizons spacecraft continuing along its interstellar journey for a billion years and eventually crashing into a habitable planet around a distant star. Its equipment would be defunct by then, just a piece of space junk composed of heavy elements with a rough surface cratered by numerous impacts…

On April 6, 2022, the United States Space Command tweeted a formal letter to NASA confirming that a meteor identified in the CNEOS catalog by my student Amir Siraj and me in 2019 as originating from outside the Solar system based on its high speed, is indeed interstellar. The meteor…