Hello friends!

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It’s the last day of 2023! So I thought I’d go over all the news from Space and Sci Fi, and look back at some of my favorite moments from this year.

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Top moments in Space News!

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There were many cool announcements and discoveries this year, but my personal favorite was the announcement of Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen as one of the crew for Artemis II, the round-the-moon-and-back mission scheduled for late 2024. (Artemis I, which had no crew but made the same trip, happened in November 2022). The long-delayed return of humans to the moon can’t happen soon enough!

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But as exciting as humans in space are, all the major discoveries are still being made by robots and space telescopes (which are also robots, in a way!) The Curiosity rover and Intrepid helicopter drone made a great team in 2023, exploring Mars and bringing back pictures, video, and even sounds!

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Hanging out around 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, the trusty James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has been taking images of space objects both near and far pretty much non-stop all year. JWST mostly sees in the infrared spectrum of light, which means the colors are slightly off compared to what our eyes would see. The benefit of viewing in the infrared is that it can pierce through clouds of gas and dust to view hidden depths inside nebulas and distant galaxies. Also, because objects farther away from us are moving away faster (due to the expansion of the universe from the Big Bang), their spectrum is shifted to the red anyway, so JWST can see farther out (and thus farther back in time!)

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Top moments in Sci Fi!

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Highlights of the year for science fiction included the nostalgia overload of Picard Season Three, and a well-executed Foundation Season Two.

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The Red Rising books weren’t released in 2023, but I read the first five of them for the first time this year. They start out with a downtrodden miner on Mars worrying about meeting his impossible quota, and end up with ridiculously over-the-top interplanetary rebellion and warfare.

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For non-fiction, I had a great time reading Phil Plait’s Under Alien Skies, which came out this year. It’s written like a travel guide for far-future tourists visiting all the most incredible places in the universe. I also enjoyed reading A City On Mars by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith, which examines the harsh practical realities of permanent space colonies, including all sorts of crazy legal ramifications of outer space settlements.

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Top moments for me in 2023!

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The year started out with a bang, as I wrote two major articles for the tech news website Ars Technica. Both the final installment of the ARM chip story and my retrospective on the Apple Lisa did very well, and were a blast to write.

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Later, I edited and helped publish a non-fiction story for my friend, Banished Across Borders. It’s the amazing true story of a family escaping from persecution in the fundamentalist regime in Iran.

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For the latter half of the year, I spent most of my time and energy at work, writing and deploying a new documentation portal website from scratch using Django and Python. It pushed me far out of my comfort zone, but was an incredible experience.

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In October, my wife and I, along with my brother-in-law and a couple of close friends, spent three weeks vacationing in Japan. I’m still trying to parse all my thoughts about the trip into a single article. It was just that mind-boggling!

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What’s next for 2024?

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I have big plans for the new year. I want to start shooting and publishing a series of videos on YouTube about the history of the personal computer, called Micro History . I also plan to finish and publish the second novel in my latest trilogy, called Silicon Dreams of Mars.

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And that’s it! I hope you and yours have a happy and safe New Year, and I’ll see you in January!

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Jeremy

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