In Netflix’s recent thriller Leave the World Behind, a series of catastrophic events plague the film’s characters while on vacation. A tanker ship rams into the coastline, self-driving cars go amuck, and there’s no internet to watch that final episode of your favorite show. As local tragedies unfold, calamities occur further afield — all provoked by an unknown instigator. Has AI or a rogue country hacked into cyberspace? Or consider a solar eruption blasting toward Earth, wreaking havoc around the globe? To find out about this latter plot, we spoke to NASA heliophysicist Madhulika Guhathakurta about space weather and missions that monitor and predict extreme geomagnetic storms on Earth.

SETI scientists observe more stars more often with the Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescope’s mega-computer network, the Commensal Open Source Multimode Interferomic Cluster (COSMIC). Collecting data alongside the VLA’s standard radio astronomy operations, COSMIC surveys hundreds of thousands of stars over a wide range of frequencies as compared to previous SETI surveys that searched only a few thousand stars at confined radio frequencies. We spoke to Chenoa Tremblay, COSMIC’s project scientist, about her circuitous career, from accountant to chemist to SETI scientist and the likelihood of finding ET.

Space archeologist Alice Gorman asks — is space travel enhancing what we value about humanity? For answers, she turns to the 20th-century luminaries philosopher Hannah Arendt, writer Aldous Huxley, theologian Paul Tillich, nuclear scientist Harrison Brown, and historian Herbert J. Muller, who were asked to ponder if humanity’s conquest of space increased or diminished our stature after the launch of the first satellite Sputnik in 1963. Sixty years on, the question remains. If you go ask Alice, it likely depends on what values we choose to prioritise in this new era of interplanetary expansion.

Agnieszka Lukaszczyk is Vice President of Government Affairs at the Earth-imaging satellite company, Planet. Her job is to help international leaders embrace a satellite constellation’s view of the world. When we spoke to her a year ago, she was pregnant with plans to give birth in her home country Poland. A borderland away, Russian forces had invaded Ukraine. “I was sobbing. I know I’m hormonal, but I was thinking, what kind of world am I bringing my child into?” If someone had a pragmatic answer to her existential question, that person would be the expectant mother herself.

Yi So-yeon might know what it feels like to be an alien from outer space. At least that’s what a group of Khazakstani nomads assumed when the astronaut emerged from her space capsule after a ballistic re-entry in 2008. Yi and her crew mates survived the emergency landing when their Soyuz vehicle malfunctioned, forcing a “vomit comet” spin at about 500 km per second. While most astronauts routinely tolerate gravitational forces 4 times stronger than Earth’s, this crew stomached a hefty 10g. Lucky for Yi, she was given essential advice while aboard the International Space Station ― throw up in the better-smelling American-made vomit bags, but wipe up with the far softer Russian toilet paper.