(CNN) -- Astronomers announced this week they found a water-rich and relatively nearby planet that's similar in size to Earth.

While the planet probably has too thick of an atmosphere and is too hot to support life similar to that found on Earth, the discovery is being heralded as a major breakthrough in humanity's search for life on other planets.

"The big excitement is that we have found a watery world orbiting a very nearby and very small star," said David Charbonneau, a Harvard professor of astronomy and lead author of an article on the discovery, which appeared this week in the journal Nature.

The planet, named GJ 1214b, is 2.7 times as large as Earth and orbits a star much smaller and less luminous than our sun. That's significant, Charbonneau said, because for many years, astronomers assumed that planets only would be found orbiting stars that are similar in size to the sun.

Because of that assumption, researchers didn't spend much time looking for planets circling small stars, he said. The discovery of this "watery world" helps debunk the notion that Earth-like planets could form only in conditions similar to those in our solar system.

"Nature is just far more inventive in making planets than we were imagining," he said.

In a way, the newly discovered planet was sitting right in front of astronomers' faces, just waiting for them to look. Instead of using high-powered telescopes attached to satellites, they spotted the planet using an amateur-sized, 16-inch telescope on the ground.

There were no technological reasons the discovery couldn't have happened long ago, Charbonneau said.

The planet is also rather near to our solar system -- only about 40 light-years away.

Planet GJ 1214b is classified as a "super-Earth" because it is between one and 10 times as large as Earth. Scientists have known about the existence of super-Earths for only a couple of years. Most planets discovered by astronomers have been gassy giants that are much more similar to Jupiter than to Earth.

Charbonneau said it's unlikely that any life on the newly discovered planet would be similar to life on Earth, but he didn't discount the idea entirely.

"This planet probably does have liquid water," he said.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/12/16/super.earth.discovery/index.htm

Spacebridge has begun! I wandered into their meeting on my way to meet Todd Huffman, who happened to minor in rocket scientist and he had a lot to contribute to the group. I'll attend their next meeting and report more but from what I gather Spacebridge's first mission is to create a long-term enduring high-altitude balloon that can pain the Noisebridge symbol in the clouds above San Francisco.This is their opening statement. 

Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the hackerspace Noisebridge, our ongoing mission to explore strange (yet economically priced) new ascent technologies; to seek out new parts and new partnerships; to boldly go where no non-government-or-massively-industrially-funded-group has gone before.

Our inaugural meeting shall be at Noisebridge at 6pm on Sunday, 20th December.

(Administrivia: because this is the future, I'm going to attempt to minute the meeting in Wave. If you don't yet have a Wave invite but would like to help with the minuting when I inevitably get bored of playing with Wave myself (ie, after the first three minutes), ping me at dichro@rcpt.to)

Subscribe to the Spacebridge mailing list here: https://www.noisebridge.net/skins/monobook/lock_icon.gif); background-repeat: no-repeat; background-attachment: initial; -webkit-background-clip: initial; -webkit-background-origin: initial; background-color: initial; padding-right: 16px; background-position: 100% 50%;" rel="nofollow">https://www.noisebridge.net/mailman/listinfo/space

Windowfarming is a DIY maker community that is totally farmpunk. On Windowfarms.org community members share techniques and how-to information as they develop new ways of growing hydroponic farms in your windows. They have a PDF instruction manual showing how to build your own hydroponic window farm that will grow "a salad a week" out of some plastic bottles attached to a window.and a simpler air pump starter version with 3 plants for beginners.

Window Farms are suspended, hydroponic, modular, low-energy, high-yield edible food gardens built using low-impact or recycled local materials. This site is the online community of window farmers, where we share our development processes and design innovations.

These vertical gardens, located in windows throughout the cityscape, are intended to inspire others to design and implement their own window farms, creating a network of urban food production. Signs in the windowfarms will challenge people to create their own and direct them to a website where we can all share photos, plans, designs, and information. Together, we can derive viable methods for growing food under the local conditions of our own homes.

To learn more about Window Farms, see windowfarms.org.

To learn how to build your own, get started with How-To instructions, or start reading posts from other window farmers throughout this site.

Please share your design process with the other farmers by joining the site and sharing your design and development process.

If you would like to join the site, please get started here.

For press inquiries, please check out some of our large downloadable images here and write to britta@windowfarms.org for interviews.

An award-winning game called World Of Goo that usually sells online for $20 successfully sold 57,000+ units to players who paid what they wanted to.

"I do get a sense ... that there is a lot of room for improvement in how games, and in fact, all digital products, are priced," he said in an email. "I think the optimal pricing strategy for any digital product is one in which every person pays what they feel is a fair price that they can afford, based on their economic situation, their perception of the value of the product, the balance of their bank account on that particular day, etc."

Get the full story at Gamastutra

This is an interesting extension of trekonomics, freemium and the NIN model beyond music and into games. This is different from just asking for donations. Getting players to pay some amount of money even if it is one cent gives them the chance to fill in the blank with an amount they think is fair.

Wolfire Games reports that WebGL is now being adopted by Safari, Mozilla and other browsers. WebGL provides Javascript binding To OpenGL ES 2.0, the same graphics library used by iPhone games. This could conceivably lead to Primer development tools like Unity being able to compile games directly to the browser's WebGL without using plugins.

;

We've begun our first sprint of the Primer project.

We're using Basecamp as a team collaboration tool with Agile Scrum methods.

It seems very nimble and well-suited to helping an adaptable team like ours get things done. I like it enough that I'd recommend it to others. If you want to try basecamp yourself, you can help fund Spacepnk and the Primer by giving Basecamp our affiliate code: ALEXPEAKE.

StraighterLine's $100 per month all-you-can-eat college courses edge us one step closer to the Primer ideal of computerization plus on-demand online mentorship. The online school is featured and explained in Kevin Carey's excellent piece in Washington Monthly:

She went online looking for something that fit her wallet and her time horizon, and an ad caught her eye: a company called StraighterLine was offering online courses in subjects like accounting, statistics, and math. This was hardly unusual—hundreds of institutions are online hawking degrees. But one thing about StraighterLine stood out: it offered as many courses as she wanted for a flat rate of $99 a month. “It sounds like a scam,” Solvig thought—she’d run into a lot of shady companies and hard-sell tactics on the Internet. But for $99, why not take a risk?

Solvig threw herself into the work, studying up to eighteen hours a day. And contrary to expectations, the courses turned out to be just what she was looking for. Every morning she would sit down at her kitchen table and log on to a Web site where she could access course materials, read text, watch videos, listen to podcasts, work through problem sets, and take exams. Online study groups were available where she could collaborate with other students via listserv and instant messaging. StraighterLine courses were designed and overseen by professors with PhDs, and she was assigned a course adviser who was available by e-mail. And if Solvig got stuck and needed help, real live tutors were available at any time, day or night, just a mouse click away.

Crucially for Solvig—who needed to get back into the workforce as soon as possible—StraighterLine let students move through courses as quickly or slowly as they chose. Once a course was finished, Solvig could move on to the next one, without paying more. In less than two months, she had finished four complete courses, for less than $200 total. The same courses would have cost her over $2,700 at Northeastern Illinois, $4,200 at Kaplan University, $6,300 at the University of Phoenix, and roughly the gross domestic product of a small Central American nation at an elite private university. They also would have taken two or three times as long to complete.

Fora TV has a clip of Matt Walker talking about sleep:

NASA says it can't yet afford to catch 2/3 of asteroids, potentially extinction level event causing threats. Spacepunks could help with this! What do we know about asteroid spotting and how can we contribute to this search?

At the moment, NASA has identified about five near-Earth objects that pose better than a 1-in-a-million risk of hitting Earth and being big enough to cause serious damage, Johnson said. That number changes from time to time, as new asteroids are added and old ones are removed as information is gathered on their orbits.

The space rocks astronomers are keeping a closest eye on are a 430-foot diameter object that has a 1-in-3,000 chance of hitting Earth in 2048 and a much-talked about asteroid, Apophis, which is twice that size and has a one-in-43,000 chance of hitting in 2036, 2037 or 2069.

Last month, NASA started a new Web site for the public to learn about threatening near-Earth objects.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32387796/ns/technology_and_science-space/

Spacepunk is all about living by good ideas (lifehacking), spreading good ideas (earthhacking), and spreading space science till we ensure human survival (spacehacking). To understand good ideas and how to spread them, we look to memetics:

A meme is any unit of cultural information, such as a practice or idea, that is transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another.

A meme is defined within memetic theory as a unit of cultural information, cultural evolution or diffusion that propagates from one mind to another analogously to the way in which a gene propagates from one organism to another as a unit of genetic information and of biological evolution. Multiple memes may propagate as cooperative groups called memeplexes (meme complexes). Via Wikipedia.

Biologist and evolutionary theorist Richard Dawkins coined the term meme in 1976. He gave as examples tunes, catch-phrases, beliefs, clothing fashions, ways of making pots, and the technology of building arches.

Meme theorists contend that memes evolve by natural selection similarly to Charles Darwin's theory of biological evolution through the processes of variation, mutation, competition, and inheritance influencing an organism's reproductive success. So with memes, some ideas will propagate less successfully and become extinct, while others will survive, spread, and, for better or for worse, mutate. Memeticists argue that the memes most beneficial to their hosts will not necessarily survive; rather, those memes that replicate the most effectively spread best, which allows for the possibility that successful memes may prove detrimental to their hosts.

JP Aerospace is a volunteer organization practicing a concept I've only ever fantasized about with my friends: airships are launch platforms. And these discussions never really go beyond "well, lets put a rocket on a balloon and see what happens." However, what JP Aerospace envisions is a series of blimps and otherwise inflatable aircraft as stepping stones, eventually floating all the way to orbit. This offers a low-cost, bulk access to space that is scalable from small satellites, to people, to heavy lifting, that is safer than traditional rocket launch vehicles. Most importantly, their Airship To Orbit project is over twenty years old. While the information pdf they have is undated, they state they'll be testing their orbital ion engine in the next five months, testing a crewed vehicle in the next eighteen, and are seven years from completion. Did I mention they were volunteers?

Visit their website and blog for more information

Virgin Galactic is playing an important role in spacepunk history. And Virgin America is in on it. Check out Unicorn Chaser, a new addition to the Virgin America fleet - "My Other Ride's A Spaceship":

The Perseids meteor shower is coming this around this Tuesday evening so get your friends prepped and get ready to see some serious fire in the sky!

The Perseids are a prolific meteor shower associated with the comet Swift-Tuttle. The Perseids are so called because the point they appear to come from, called theradiant, lies in the constellation Perseus. Meteor showers occur when Earth moves through a meteor stream. The stream in this case is called the Perseid cloud and it stretches along the orbit of the Comet Swift-Tuttle. The cloud consists of particles ejected by the comet as it passed by the Sun. Most of the dust in the cloud today is approximately a thousand years old. However, there is also a relatively young filament of dust in the stream that was pulled off the comet in 1862. The rate of meteors originating from this filament is much higher than for the older part of the stream.

Links to learn more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perseids 

Instructions to view them: http://stardate.org/nightsky/meteors

Astrophotography is taking images of space for fun and astronomy.

This gallery of the best astrophotography of the last 35 years shows some of the most amazing glimpses of the universe ever seen.

SpaceForUs, an excellent space blog by Angus McDonald, has a good article About how Google has launched a lunar prize to reward whoever gets a privately funded rover to the moon.

@WogGryphin tweets a great article called Gin, Television, and Social Surplus by Clay Shirky to us: One of those ideas that floats as an vapor in the back of your mind, found one who puts it in words. thx @lxpk for blog:

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, "Where do they find the time?" when they're looking at things like Wikipedia don't understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that's finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.

Now, the interesting thing about a surplus like that is that society doesn't know what to do with it at first--hence the gin, hence the sitcoms. Because if people knew what to do with a surplus with reference to the existing social institutions, then it wouldn't be a surplus, would it? It's precisely when no one has any idea how to deploy something that people have to start experimenting with it, in order for the surplus to get integrated, and the course of that integration can transform society...

It's also become my motto, when people ask me what we're doing--and when I say "we" I mean the larger society trying to figure out how to deploy this cognitive surplus, but I also mean we, especially, the people in this room, the people who are working hammer and tongs at figuring out the next good idea.

http://www.shirky.com/herecomeseverybody/2008/04/looking-for-the-mouse.html

After flying to 70,000 feet aboard a U2 spyplane wearing an astronaut-style suit, the host of Top Gear James Mayes said, "If everyone could do that once, it would change the face of global politics, religion, education, everything... It's going to take a while for that to sink in." Link

Over a long enough timeline, the survival rate for each of us drops to zero, but the survival rate for everyone approaches infinity on the edge of a razorblade: Either humanity prospers in outer space forever or we all perish by cosmic murder or technological suicide. If we're going to ride that edge all the way into the sunset, we're going to need to engage in organized counter-eschatology. The war on terrorism is a blip compared to the war on the ends of the world.

There's a variety of threats that could end your life, end your community or end humanity and all life on Earth. Each is known and observed by a certain number of people who try to guard against such an end of the world scenario.

Here's a tool that lets you see a summary of the eschatologies and rank the ones you're most concerned about: End Of America.

Randal Klopping has written a good summary of the threats Humans face from space.

Now I’m no Chicken Little and I’m not going to tell you that the world is going to end tomorrow, though technically speaking, it could! While here on Earth there are very few things that could threaten us as a race, out beyond our skies there exist phenomena’s with the potential to wipe all life off the face of the Earth. The newly discovered scar on Jupiter is a reminder of this. Nobody saw the object, just the scar of the impact.

And as for those who think we should blow up da earth ourselves after we take a nap and fire ze missiles, someone has written an exhaustive treatise on how hard the Earth is to blow up and how it might be accomplished: Can we destroy the Earth? It has a number of scenarios for possible threats to the Earth including plans for setting up Dr. Evil-style bases to orchestrate such plans.

I say without cynicism that today, of all the people in the world, the President of the United States of America would be the person most likely to be able to destroy the Earth should he decide to. If you feel you lack the ability to make it in politics (knowledge of your weaknesses is a strength), you should join the armed forces and shoot for Supreme General or whatever the highest rank is.

Nancy Lebovitz suggested religion as an alternate means of gaining resources, money and manpower. Religion is undeniably a very powerful force. If you could set yourself up as a religious leader you could potentially gain a lot of supporters - who would be much more dedicated to you as a leader than a soldier would be to his general or a citizen to his King/President/Supreme Dictator-For-Life. Setting oneself up as a new prophet doesn't seem to attract much more than scepticism in this day and age, so unless you were very persuasive, you'd probably experience greatest success by hijacking an existing mainstream religion for your own ends. One potential pitfall is that there's a limit to what your followers can provide you in terms of monetary offerings and labour. Manpower alone is not enough. You'd still need at least one scientific mastermind, and frankly I see scientific masterminds as being among the least likely to follow you... But this is a kink you should be able to work out.

Of course, by the time it becomes even possible to destroy the Earth, Madagascar might be the dominant superpower, or the whole world might be unified as a single nation, or maybe the whole galaxy is full of humans, there's no such thing as money, and solid platinum asteroids and robot workers are plentiful. I

don't know. Whatever you can manage. Anyway, once you have everything you need at your disposal, make the calls, submit your proposals, and set the project in motion.