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6 articles
When a radio signal takes 22 hours to reach Voyager 1 and another 22 to get an answer back, 'Houston, we have a problem' stops being a useful sentence. Scientists and engineers are rethinking communication from the ground up — and the solutions are weirder and more profound than you'd expect.
Quantum computers promise to crack problems that would take classical machines millions of years—but the infrastructure required to keep them running is quietly becoming a crisis of its own. We look at the staggering energy and cooling demands of next-gen quantum systems, and ask whether the technology's revolutionary potential comes with an environmental price tag that nobody's fully added up yet.
The universe is roughly 13.8 billion years old, contains an estimated two trillion galaxies, and has had plenty of time to produce civilizations that could fill it with noise. So why is the cosmic radio dial so relentlessly quiet? We dug into the latest science — and some seriously uncomfortable philosophy — to figure out what that silence is actually telling us.
SpaceX, Blue Origin, and a wave of scrappy startups aren't waiting for governments to draw the map — they're already laying the groundwork for commercial lunar bases. The legal framework governing who owns what on the moon hasn't kept pace, and that gap could define humanity's future in space.
Humanity is seriously mapping out cities on Mars while millions of Americans can't afford rent and coastal cities brace for rising seas. Is off-world colonization our greatest insurance policy — or the most expensive distraction we've ever invented? We dig into the tensions that space agencies and tech billionaires would rather not talk about.
There are roughly 27,000 tracked pieces of debris circling Earth right now, and thousands more too small to follow. If we don't get serious about cleaning up low Earth orbit, the window for safe space travel could close faster than anyone wants to admit.