History Meets Science

Are We the First Intelligent Life in the Universe? Maybe Not Are we the first intelligent life in the universe? It sounds like a yes-or-no question. But one word in it is stranger than it looks: first . That is a word about time, not distance. Imagine an intelligent species that appeared a billion years ago, lasted a few thousand years, and vanished long before there were humans to notice. If something like that happened, distance would not be what kept us apart. Time would. I didn't start with aliens, though. I started with a quieter question: why do we exist, and how did we come to be? The more I turned it over, the further my mind drifted, until it ended up among the stars. By aliens, I mean intelligent life, someone like us, who lived a life and asked why they were there at all. I do think someone like that has existed somewhere besides here, maybe long before us. I don't have evidence for that. What I have is a problem with the alternative: that in all that t...

How Did NASA Fix Hubble Without Replacing Its Mirror? I first heard the name Hubble in middle school. Not the astronomer, Edwin Hubble — the telescope. For a while, that name was almost the entire universe to me: nebulas in a magazine, a narrator's voice in a documentary, a photo pinned to the corner of a textbook page. All of it traced back to the same machine. One question stuck, though: did astronauts actually replace Hubble's mirror? The version I picked up was short. The telescope launched nearsighted, astronauts flew up, and they fixed it. Said often enough, that summary started to feel like the whole story. Looking it up recently, I found the answer was no, and that the real story cost NASA something the short version leaves out. Young boy discovering the universe through Hubble Space Telescope images in a science magazine In December 1993, seven astronauts flew to Hubble, and four of them carried out five spacewalks, a first for a single shuttle mission. ...

The Soviet Moon Program Could Get There. It Couldn't Get Home. Three months before Apollo 8 carried three astronauts around the Moon, two Russian steppe tortoises had already made the trip and come back alive. They rode inside a Soviet spacecraft called Zond, a vehicle built to carry two cosmonauts on exactly that route. No cosmonaut ever flew it. Between 1968 and 1970, five Zond spacecraft flew out to lunar distance and started home without a crew, never once trying to set down on the surface. Four of the five failed on the way back. That is the part of the Soviet moon program most accounts skip, and it is the reason the Soviet Union kept postponing a flight it had spent five years preparing for. What survives in public memory instead is a myth: that Zond was a covert attempt to land cosmonauts on the Moon's far side before Apollo got there. Nothing in the record supports that. The record shows five flights, four failed returns, and one that worked exactly as designe...