blog@Yantrajaal

When I was a child, we used to spend Durga Puja at the foot of the Ayodhya Hills, Purulia where one of the fascinations was to spot artificial satellites, with our naked eyes, as they darted through the stars across the night sky. This Deepawali, parked in the pristine gardens of the Tumsong Tea Retreat near the dreamy town of Ghoom, Darjeeling, I was looking forward to a similar sky show when a thought struck me. Chinese fireworks may be out of favour this year, but right above me in the sky, was Tiangong 2, the Chinese permanent space station where two Chinese taikonauts had just arrived for their month long tour of duty. Living in space is tough and the technology necessary to make space habitable and safe for humans is very difficult and expensive to develop. Hence China’s Taikonauts@Tiangong is an impressive feat, but is it really necessary? Should India try to catch up? Or is there an alternate, inexpensive approach? The sci-fi stories of Isaac Asimov’s famous “positronic” ro...

If not on Earth, where else can humans beings be? Not as a traveller in a spacecraft or as a one-off tourist on the Moon but as an immigrant, or a colonizer who sets up a permanent residency for multiple generations. Given our current knowledge of physics and the state of propulsion technology, we really do not have the ability to travel to other stars in a reasonable amount of time, so our search for that second home for humanity is restricted to our own solar system. Where do we start? photo credit  Tittat427 There are two divergent points of view on where to locate such an extraterrestrial colony. Some believe that the colony should be located on a natural body like a planet, satellite or an asteroid while others think that the best bet would be an artificial structure in orbit around a planet or in space. There are pros and cons for both. What is common to both approaches is the realisation that any environment outside the terrestrial biosphere that we currently inh...