What Would It Take to Move Mercury?

[Considerable technical content this month. For those unfamiliar with the subject, I recommend Robert Braeunig’s introduction to basic orbital mechanics.]

When it comes to space colonization, Mars gets all the love. This makes a certain amount of sense—it’s the most similar planet to Earth and the easiest target for crewed missions. NASA spends a lot of time talking about its #JourneyToMarsand…

This article was written in 2007  - that's before the release of ME1 gaiz, which is evident by the rephrasing of mind-uploading as "nonbiological intelligence" rather than "synthetic intelligence", which is much more pleasant to get your mouth around. That's what she said. Moving on - but still a neat read and it makes me excited about the future and wondering what's developed in the past 5 years since this was written.

I know we've had our first cybernetic hate crime since then. (Er, that's bad, not good, but no one expected humans to be any less stupid just because we are in the future.)