Which enemy is worse for future spaceship captains: a flotilla of Star Trek baddies or a weakness in the ship’s complex software system?
For those who are familiar with the highly intricate system of systems nature of software, the answer is clear; it's the software that poses the greatest risk.
Traveling at interstellar distances requires a self-sufficient, self-supporting ship and crew, requiring rapid in-house solutions to the gravest engineering situations. The inherent exponential complexity and ultimate fragility of software makes it one of the weakest links in long term survival aboard an interstellar spacecraft.
The supermassive black hole is 40 million times as massive as the sun and powers a quasar that existed 700 million years after the Big Bang.
The asteroid zoomed by Earth at a perfectly safe distance of around 1.8 million miles (2.9 kilometers).
Images show surprise changes to the spacecraft as it interacted with the atmosphere.
