Speculative Nonfiction

Speculative Hard Science and Science Fiction. And Metal.

Sunday, January 13, 2019

Reaction: Gun, With Occasional Music (Lethem)

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Highly recommended; spoilers follow. Science fiction which only recycles the surface trappings of the genre without using them as a vehic...

Dying Fetus, Your Treachery Will Die With You (Descend Into Depravity, 2009)

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Thursday, January 3, 2019

Arkona, Stenka na Stenku (Stenka na Stenku, 2011)

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H/T Chris. Who know that the folk metal genre was rich enough to be sub-sub-divided into eastern and western folk metal? Also check o...
Saturday, December 22, 2018

Deoxyribose From Abiotic Space Conditions

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Another biomolecule, the pentose sugar that serves as the backbone of DNA, quickly produced in un-directed synthesis under conditions that o...
Monday, December 10, 2018

Space Colonies Will Be Run By Dictators; Or, Why Science Fiction Is About Government Space Travel

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Settling colonies in the age of exploration was easy. Jamestown in particular seemed like a breeze . There was air, water, food, and even ...
Saturday, November 10, 2018

Interstellar and Intergalactic Panspermia

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Active colonization time estimates for the galaxy are invariably much shorter than the lifespan of the galaxy . Passive diffusion would ta...
Sunday, September 23, 2018

Ice Volcanoes on Ceres May Provide Replicators Means of Spreading

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Extraterrestrial replicators (be they naturally-evolved, or von Neumann probes or the mutant descendants thereof) are at least as likely to ...
Saturday, September 22, 2018

Sometimes You Need a Little Puerile Humor

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And sometimes you need a lot, so please watch this awesome video by Infant Annihilator, for their #1 hit Decapitation Fornication. ...
Saturday, September 8, 2018

A Tiny Fraction of the Things Wrong With Star Wars

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I always think those "Everything wrong with X science fiction or superhero movie" videos are the saddest things in the world. If ...
Thursday, August 30, 2018

No Radio Signals from Oumuamua

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To help rule out Oumuamua as an interstellar probe, it was investigated and found to have no detectable transmissions within 1-10 GHz down t...
Tuesday, August 28, 2018

The Interstellar Urey-Miller Experiment

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Summary here. At 5.5 K in Interstellar ice you get aromatic ring precursors. Note - the materials from the original experiment remain at...
Saturday, August 11, 2018

XKCD - Expanded Hertzprung-Russell Diagram

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Reminds me of the interesting factoid: on a power-per-mass basis, our sun produces less Wattage than reptile metabolism. (Reptiles! Doesn...
Sunday, July 29, 2018

Implications for Panspermia: Metazoans Can Survive Freezing Under Natural Conditions

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Nematodes were frozen in Siberian permafrost 42,000 years ago, and were thawed in a lab , showing behaviors like feeding. This has implicat...
Tuesday, July 24, 2018

Look for RNA-World Rock Strata on the Moon

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Schulze-Makuch and Crawford show in Astrobiology that that the Moon may have briefly been habitable - either (two options) about 4.5 billion...
Sunday, July 22, 2018

Attempts at Interstellar Communication: Receipts and Responses Within Your Lifetime

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tl;dr Lots of scientists are on record saying that broadcasting messages to nearby stars is dangerous . If you take other low-probability h...
Tuesday, July 3, 2018

Complex Organics from Enceladus

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The work is driven by a chemical species that is hard to explain as other than the result of the reaction of these other complex molecules, ...
Thursday, June 28, 2018

Interstellar Object Oamuamua is Releasing Vapor

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A Nature paper by Micheli et al demonstrates that outgassing is one plausible explanation for the subtle changes being measured in Oamuamu...
Saturday, June 23, 2018

Another Interstellar Asteroid - This One a Permanent Resident of the Solar System

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Asteroid BZ interested astronomers right away, because it is retrograde, in a 1:-1 resonance with Jupiter - suggesting that it was captured ...
Thursday, June 21, 2018

The Trigon Disunity by Michael P. Kube-McDowell - Emprise, Enigma, and Empery)

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I'd always wanted to do a blog post on this really solid series from the 80s , which I just learned on going back to read about, was nom...
Tuesday, May 29, 2018

Make Your Own Genre Crossovers by Imagining Subtext

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There's a fan theory that Get Out is actually the sequel to Being John Malgovich , and that Katherine Keener is playing the same charac...
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About Me

Michael Caton
I am a physician, writer and trail runner. You can reach me at mdcblogs@gmail.com.
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