The Doomsday Clock keeps ticking, and other stories
Welcome to Ramin’s Space, the newsletter from WIRED space writer Ramin Skibba. You can read more about the newsletter here. If you like it, please consider subscribing and sharing this post.
75 Years On, The Doomsday Clock Keeps Ticking
Just two years after the US demolished the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with the first and only uses of nuclear bombs so far, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists designed their now-iconic Doomsday Clock. And it’s still relevant today. In this story for WIRED, I explore its history and legacy, as we’re now closer to the apocalypse than ever, thanks to nukes, climate change, and other global threats.
Astrophysicists Release the Biggest Map of the Universe Yet
A team of scientists with the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, at Kitt Peak near Tucson, Arizona, just put together the largest map of the cosmos yet, and they’re just getting started. They’ll chart some 40 million galaxies before they’re through. This was one of the most popular stories in WIRED this month.
NASA’s Newest Spinoff Tech Comes Back to Earth
Thanks to NASA’s research and development and to its public-private partnerships, people have managed to bring the space agency’s innovations back down to Earth, in the form of robotic gloves, environmental sensors, new materials for cold-weather clothes, and other inventions. (But stuff like Velcro and Tang didn’t start with NASA.)
Games Bring Space Exploration Home. But They Omit the Full Risks
There’s a lot of impressive space-themed board games out there, including High Frontier and Terraforming Mars. Yes, they’re just games, but I’d like to see them better incorporate ethical challenges we’re all dealing with in space, including limited resources and risks involved in terraforming. This is my first piece for the Ideas section.
Astronomers Discover a Strange Galaxy Without Dark Matter
Scientists believe there’s dark matter throughout the universe, making up the hidden skeleton of the cosmos, with huge clumps of dark matter particles holding galaxies together. So the new sighting of an apparently dark matter-less galaxy poses a conundrum. No one can really explain yet what’s going on with this strange object.
In other writing…
Another green world
Replicating and simulating ecosystems turns out to be more complicated than people imagined. This interesting piece in Harper’s magazine by Jessica Camille Aguirre shows the successes and failures of Biosphere 2, near Tucson, Arizona, and reveals how challenging similar attempts in space will be.
COVID parenting has passed the point of absurdity
This pandemic has been rough for parents, including me, and the rapidly spreading Omicron variant has only made things worse. In this piece in The Atlantic, Melinda Wenner Moyer focuses on the US, where we have very little government support, while lacking affordable healthcare and subsidized childcare. It’s not sustainable.
Nuclear-testing ‘downwinders’ speak about history and fear
During the Cold War, American researchers detonated hundreds of nuclear bombs at testing sites, many of them in Nevada. It doesn’t get much attention, but many people living “downwind” of those tests were exposed to radiation, and some developed cancer as a result. Fascinating and disturbing story by Sarah Scoles in Scientific American.
Mementos mori
Now for something completely different. I thought this was an interesting review essay by Sophie Haigney in The Baffler about objects that disappear from society, sometimes later than they should (like ashtrays and arsenic wallpaper), and some shouldn’t have disappeared, like monorails and other public transit systems.
2021 made Joe Biden a climate crisis president
President Biden had to make at least five disaster tours over the past year, and there will surely be more to come. More than two-thirds of Americans have perceived a rise in extreme weather, making them more concerned about climate change, according to a recent poll. I just hope the Biden administration makes climate policies a bigger priority in 2022. Story in The Guardian by Katharine Gammon.
What I’m reading: Space Barons, by Christian Davenport, space reporter for the Washington Post. It tells interesting stories about Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson and Paul Allen, and about the history of their companies. But it’s only one side of story, and Davenport almost gushes over these billionaires.
Looking back: Two years ago I published this opinion piece in Undark magazine, and it was a finalist for a Covering Climate Now journalism award. I still believe that climate change is primarily a political crisis, though our personal actions do matter.
More about me: I’m the space writer at WIRED magazine, and I’m based in San Diego. I used to be a freelance writer and journalist, and before that, an astrophysicist. You can find me at my website, raminskibba.net, and on Twitter @raminskibba. I’m also former president of the San Diego Science Writers Association (SANDSWA) and on the board of the National Association of Science Writers (NASW), though the opinions I express are mine alone. If someone has forwarded this email to you, you’re welcome to subscribe too.