Are we alone? How did we get here? Where are we headed?
At NASA, our mission is to explore. We visit destinations in our solar system and study worlds beyond to better understand these big questions.
We also dream. We dream of traveling to distant worlds, and what that might be like. In the video above you can see fanciful, imagined adventures to real places we’ve studied at NASA.
How We Did It
Check out how we created these otherworldly scenes in the video below. A NASA videographer used green screens to add motion and real people to bring life to our series of solar system and exoplanet travel posters.
Let’s dive into one example from the video. The shot of kayaking on Titan showcases the real rivers and lakes of liquid methane and ethane that slosh and flow on Saturn’s largest moon. Titan’s mysterious surface was revealed by our Cassini spacecraft, which also deployed the European Space Agency’s Huygens probe to the surface. The atmosphere on Titan is so thick, and the gravity so light, that with each strike of a paddle, you might be lofted above the swift current as you ride the tides through a narrow strait called the Throat of Kraken. NASA scientist Mike Malaska studies Titan and collaborated on the poster featured in the video. His research informed the artwork, and so did a hobby: kayaking. Those ultra-cold chemical seas might be even more of a challenge than shown here. Your boat might crack, or even dissolve, Malaska said.
We’ll learn more about Titan when our Dragonfly mission of dual quadcoptors — rotorcraft with eight blades each — visits the icy moon in 2034.
Science Never Stops
Our understanding of other worlds is always evolving, and sometimes we learn new details after we illustrate our science. In one of our travel posters, we show a traveler standing on the surface of exoplanet Kepler-16b with two shadows formed by the planet’s two suns. The planet does indeed orbit two stars, but with later size and mass refinements, we now think it would be hard to stand there and enjoy a binary sunset. There isn’t a solid surface to stand on a gas planet, and that’s what Kepler-16b now appears to be!
In addition to sharing how sublime science can be, these scenes are a reminder that there are lots of careers in the space program, not just scientist, engineer, or astronaut. A creative team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California produced the travel posters, originally to help share the work of NASA’s Exoplanet Exploration Program. They are the result of lots of brainstorming and discussion with real NASA scientists, engineers, and expert communicators. The video versions of these spacey travel scenes were produced by visualization experts at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
All of this work is meant to inspire, and to explore the edge of possibility. It’s also an invitation. With science, we’re stepping into the future. Join us?
On this day, 20 October 1952, Governor Baring of Kenya signed an order declaring a State of Emergency to use emergency powers to crush the Mau Mau rebellion against British colonial rule (content note: sexual and physical violence).
Early the next morning British authorities carried out a mass arrest of over 180 allegedly Mau Mau leaders in Nairobi. Over the coming years the British would murder tens of thousands of civilians, throw 3-400,000 or more into concentration camps and displace over a million more into army-supervised villages which were essentially prison camps.
On top of this British forces dropped over 6 million bombs on the country and carried out a mass campaign of torture, mutilation, rape and castration. Tens of thousands of men, women, children and even babies were killed to suppress the uprising.
Despite the repression, Britain was forced to grant Kenyan independence regardless in 1963.
This is a short video history of the events: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uk3RWZ-ufAAhttps://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1834841626700979/?type=3
Unions are trash. Theyll Destroy a whole company for firing a shitty worker.
unions are the reason you aren’t paid 2.50 an hour with steel beams about to bust ya head open shut up lol
Unions are why you have 5 day, 40 hour full-time work weeks. Unions are why they have to pay you in actual dollars instead of “company credits” that you can only spend at the company-owned stores. Unions are why there are fucking fire exits at your place of work. Unions are why it’s not okay for your supermarket ground beef to be any percentage human.
You think your company pays you out of the goodness of their hearts? Or even out of “market pressure?” The “job market” is a myth perpetuated by the capitalists. Corporations would pay you nothing if they could get away with it. And you argue “oh, but if they paid me nothing I’d just go to another one.” Wrong. Because to maximize profits, they all want to pay you nothing. Corporations exist to maximize profits while reducing risk for investors. It’s part of their entire function to find ways to cut costs as much as possible, and that includes finding ways to pay you nothing.
Unions are your defense against that. You think all a union does is strike? If you pay union dues, a lot of that is spent on lobbyists in various governments reminding your lawmakers that you have rights as a living human being that a corporation should not be able to stomp all over. Unions hire lawyers so that if you’re fired for bullshit reasons, the union can stand up for you against your boss. They’re called unions because workers are uniting to pool resources so that they can stand up to these corporate overlords with more money than God. Unions exist because you might not have the words, resources, or time to fight workplace injustices all by yourself. That’s the whole fucking point.
And if a business shuts down because a union is striking, it’s because the business was abusing people and didn’t deserve to be in business anyway. Don’t make excuses for the corporations. They already have trillions of dollars and a couple million lawyers to do that for themselves. They don’t need your help.
The erasure of labor history from US history curriculum has caused so much fucking damage to this country.
Bosses: If you don’t like how we do things, don’t work here.
Workers: *Go on strike*
Bosses: Wait no not like that
“French are cowards” you all are cowards for letting getting paid 10$/day.
This blog is mostly so I can vent my feelings and share my interests. Other than that, I am nothing special.
If you don't like Left Wing political thought and philosophy, all things related to horror, the supernatural, the grotesque, guns or the strange, then get the fuck out. I just warned you.
