Americans May Be a Bit Too Optimistic About Space Travel

Posted on by onespaceman2000

The latest Harper’s Index from Harper’s magazine had a few interesting statistics related to space travel and alien encounters (something discussed in Friday’s post).

Here are the two stastistics:

  • Portion of Americans in 1998 who believed that space travel would be common for ordinary Americans by 2025:  3/10
  • Portion of Americans in 1998 who believed that humans would make contact with extraterrestrial life by 2025:  1/4

Both come from a Gallup poll conducted back in 1998. You can read more about the various survey results in this Gallup story.

Given that the Artemis II mission is still struggling to get to the Moon, and the only new life we seem to have encountered was created in a laboratory by OpenAI and others, I would say we are far from this mark. However, Americans were a little better at predicting some of the social trends, including the 69 percent who expected the country would elect a Black president by 2025.

It is also good that some of the predictions were off, particularly those related to disease, disaster, and war (shown below). Then again, the respondents (76 percent) who predicted the emergence of a deadly new disease were spot on regarding COVID.

Study Findings: Building Wet Planets Through High-Pressure Magma–Hydrogen Reactions

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Credit: Image by Yol Gezer from Pixabay

Nature abstract of study findings:

Close-in transiting sub-Neptunes are abundant in our Galaxy. Planetary interior models based on their observed radius–mass relationship suggest that sub-Neptunes contain a discernible amount of either hydrogen (dry planets) or water (wet planets) blanketing a core composed of rocks and metal. Water-rich sub-Neptunes have been believed to form farther from the star and then migrate inwards to their present orbits. Here we report experimental evidence of reactions between warm, dense hydrogen fluid and silicate melt that release silicon from the magma to form alloys and hydrides at high pressures. We found that oxygen liberated from the silicate melt reacts with hydrogen, producing an appreciable amount of water up to a few tens of weight per cent, which is much greater than previously predicted based on low-pressure ideal gas extrapolation. Consequently, these reactions can generate a spectrum of water contents in hydrogen-rich planets, with the potential to reach water-rich compositions for some sub-Neptunes, implying an evolutionary relationship between hydrogen-rich and water-rich planets. Therefore, detection of a large amount of water in exoplanet atmospheres may not be the optimal evidence for planet migration in the protoplanetary disk, calling into question the assumed link between composition and planet formation location.

Citation: Horn, H.W., Vazan, A., Chariton, S. et al. Building wet planets through high-pressure magma–hydrogen reactions. Nature 646, 1069–1074 (2025).

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09630-7

Study-related stories:

Science News – “Some Planets Might Home Brew their Own Water”

Universe Today – “Some Exoplanets Can Create Their Own Water Through Crust-Atmosphere Reactions”

Space Daily – “Water Production on Exoplanets Revealed by Pressure Experiments”

More Files to be Released, But This Time it’s UFOs

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Credit: Image by andrewnawroski from Pixabay

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Not to be outdone by former president Obama, who let it slip that he believes in UFOs, President Trump is now promising to release all of those hidden UFO files. Of course, this is likely just another distraction from the Epstein files, which are currently causing the defenestration of top political and corporate officials.

Someone may want to tell the president that the federal government is already releasing this type of UFO, or should I say Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP), information for years. The office doing this work is called the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office.

If this UFO release is anything like the release of the Epstein files, it will involve years of false promises, followed by a horrendous battle with Congress over the actual release of this information to the public, and finally the slow dribble of incomplete files that only further enrage the public.

This should be a mess, just like everything in Washington these days.

Posted in UFO

Pic of the Week: A Protostar in the Cepheus A Region

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): The Cepheus A region, including a protostar causing much of this region’s illumination. (NASA, ESA, and R. Fedriani (Instituto de Astrofisica de Andalucia); Processing: Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America))

This week’s image was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. It shows the star-forming region Cepheus A in the constellation of Cepheus. This region is about 2,400 light-years away.

Here is more from NASA about this region:

The high-mass star-forming region Cepheus A hosts a collection of baby stars, including one large and luminous protostar, which accounts for about half of the region’s brightness. While much of the region is shrouded in opaque dust, light from hidden stars breaks through outflow cavities to illuminate and energize areas of gas and dust, creating pink and white nebulae. The pink area is an HII region, where the intense ultraviolet radiation of the nearby stars has converted the surrounding clouds of gas into glowing, ionized hydrogen.

Movie: In the Blink of an Eye

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Credit: Hulu

On February 27th, a new movie called In the Blink of an Eye premieres on Hulu. It sounds like an interesting story told in three parts over thousands of years from primitive human life all the way to travel to a new planet. You can see the outline for yourself in this trailer.

While I did not see many movies showing up for 2026 in this realm, they tend to pop up like mushrooms when they are ready. That is fine with me. It also has the same director as WALL-E, which gives me hope.

So far the reviews are so-so.

RogerEbert.com states:

At just around 90 minutes, it often feels like the Cliffs Notes version of a 500-page novel. 

And Rotten Tomatoes has the TomatoReader at 16 percent based on 19 reviews. Richard Lawson with The Hollywood Reporter states:

There is so little texture to these character arcs that the actors are mostly just working in service of a blandly uplifting message. It’s as if they’ve all been commissioned by a well-funded science museum.

I still want to judge the film for myself. Plus, I like the cast that includes Kate McKinnon, Rashida Jones, and Daveed Diggs.

You can wait for the perfect film, or simply take what is offered at the moment.

Image (Credit): A scene from the film In the Blink of an Eye. (Hulu)