Crazy Ideas Archive

Like 'Goodbye Global Warming', 'Flying Starfish' didn't tickle the editorial fancy either. Not contentious but possibly a bit too similar in style the the previous Apollo anniversary articles perhaps. Again, I'm including it here so you can make up your own mind. Nearly 400 million years ago, a 3 foot long half-lizard, half-fish pulled itself out of the ocean and went for a walk on a muddy, equatorial shore. Lurching forward on limbs more fin than foot and dragging its tail along the ground it continued on for about 45 feet and then… And then we don’t know. That short, indistinct trail of prints and tail are all that we have, preserved now in rock at the edge of the island of Valentia off the East coast of Ireland. The creature was a tetrapod. Evolved during the Devonian period, it was one of the earliest known animals to leave behind the warmth and safety of the sea to brave the unknown danger of the harsh, dry land. These proto-amphibians became the ancestors ...

I hope you’re reading this on some obscure history blog sometime in t he  22 nd Century, smiling wryly at my lack of foresight as you Hyperloop across Mars,  past Calrketown, Saganville and New Bezos on your way to Muskbury. I really hope you   are because I’d like nothing better than to be proved conclusively wrong with this crazy idea – maybe Space X won’t get us to Mars. If they don’t, it wouldn’t be the first time the space dream has come crashing to earth. This article –  ‘Paper Rockets’  and the one that follows –  ‘The Interplanetary Marshmallow Test’  – were published in the British and US Mensa magazines to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the Apollo Moon landing. Though different, they have some overlapping themes and language so I hope you’ll forgive any similarities. A giant, 50 metre tall rocket with the lifting power of four Saturn V’s, fully reusable and capable of putting 500 tons into orbit every flight. B...

You can tell Elon Musk was probably the kind of kid who would have aced the Marshmallow Test. The test goes like this; put a small child and a marshmallow in a room. Tell the child they can eat the marshmallow now but if they wait they can have 2 marshmallows when you get back. Leave the room for 15 minutes. The children who wait – the ones who can forgo one marshmallow now for two later – generally tend to do better in life. That’s the idea anyway. The test’s conclusions are disputed but the ability to postpone instant gratification in favour of a long-term goal is certainly an important life skill – for a species as well as an individual. Image: NASA Leaving Earth and colonising space – whether that’s orbiting space habitats, the Moon, Mars or elsewhere – is, effectively, an interplanetary marshmallow test. A species that can look past short-terms costs to the long-term benefit wins. They win in the only way the Universe cares about – by staying alive. There’s no guarantee humans are...

Somewhere in my house, quietly turning to coal under a pile of papers, is a ‘planetary calculator’ (astronomy stats on two sliding pieces of cardboard), a free gift with the second issue of Star Lord comic in May 1978. Shifting the display to Pluto confidently declares that world to be moonless – as well established a fact as nearly 50 years of observations with the world’s biggest telescopes could make it. Since then, the Hubble telescope as well as the New Horizons probe fly-by has produced terabytes of data on the size, composition, orbits, shape, appearance etc of Pluto’s five moons. A torrent of brand new information that nobody in that May of 1978 had any reason to expect even existed. In Donald Rumsfeld’s immortal words, Pluto’s moons were an unknown unknown. How much has yet to be discovered? What unknown unknowns lie before us? Just how high does Mount Rumsfeld go? It’s those unknown unknowns that trip us up. We are in the position of a mountain climber who can only look down....