Some recent research on the long-term future of the Milky Way prompted me to dig out and re-polish this post from the Life, Unbounded archives of 2010. Turns out it’s more relevant than ever… The galactic theme in the context of planets and life is an interesting one. Take our own particular circumstances. As unappealingly [...]

Warning: Exoplanets may appear less massive than they really are (images used: Eysteinn Guðni Guðnason and NASA/Kepler) Exoplanets can be confusing things. Recently we’ve seem the announcement of a milestone for NASA’s Kepler mission with the confirmation of a planet in the habitable zone of its Sun-like star. The planet, Kepler 22-b, has a diameter [...]

One of the biggest thrills of exoplanetary science is seeing how it combines the new and the old, with every discovery bringing startling perspective on the nature of our own very familiar solar system. I thought I’d dig out a post from the Life, Unbounded archives that helps illustrate this. A freshly edited version of [...]

In 1964 Stephen Dole published a hundred and seventy-four page document for a US Air Force project at the RAND corporation in Santa Monica, California. With not a little hubris it was titled “Habitable Planets for Man“, an extraordinarily detailed and prescient scientific study of the nature of worlds that might support life in the [...]