Episode 5: Islands in a sea of darkness

WRITTEN BY: AURORA SIMIONESCU You may imagine that the Universe is full of strange and complicated physics, and you’d be right. But that’s not the most difficult thing about it. Understanding the sheer size of our cosmos probably poses a bigger challenge to our minds than the most complicated physics … Continue reading

Episode 4: Interplanetary travel

WRITTEN BY: NORBERT WERNER AND AURORA SIMIONESCU When Aurora was growing up in communist Romania, before the 1989 revolution, many foreign books were hard to come by. Her introduction to the genre of science fiction was what she’d later remember only as “that book with the purple cover that I … Continue reading

Episode 3: Life in the Solar System

WRITTEN BY: AURORA SIMIONESCU AND NORBERT WERNER We met Dr. Oleg Gusev in September 2012 at the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science in Japan. During his presentation, he took a test tube containing something that looked like little red crystals – unmistakably dead and dried out, closely resembling colorful … Continue reading