exit mundi: a collection of end-of-world scenarios (link via Daily Illuminator)
Category: Science Fiction and Fantasy
Neil Gaiman blogs a tender parenting moment:
“That’s right,” I said, and bit the bullet. We were having The Conversation. “You were named after a drag queen in a Lou Reed song.”
SolStation.com is the home of both the excellent 3D starmapper ChView (less flashy than Celestia, but probably more useful for writers and roleplayers) and an impressive detailed list of notable
nearby stars
Through them, I found Exoplaneten.de, which has enthusiastic visualisations of real extrasolar planets.
Stuff found rummaging about the Orion’s Arm site, including its History and inspiration sources, as well as some other hard-SF space-opera worldbuilding projects, some of which were used as source material and directly incorporated into Orion’s Arm: The ArcBuilders universe, the Ad Astra RPG setting and the Hamilton Institute of Exopaleontology. Most of these are more conventional Space Opera in tone (i.e., less Godlike AIs).
Categories
Faster Than Light
NASA Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Project (no longer funded) has an introduction to space travel which covers FTL and reactionless drives – Warp
Drive- When? The only suggestions for Faster Than Light travel that appear to have scientific credibility (for very lenient values of "credibility") are Wormholes and the Alcubierre drive (original paper here), both of which rely on Exotic Matter (matter with negative mass). Exotic matter probably gives us reactionless drives as well, like the diametric drive (cool name). Now, if only we could find some…
For an SFish treatment of these concepts, the Orion’s Arm project has nice entries on Wormholes and Reactionless Drives.