Think fast. You’ve only got a day or so to work on this. You’ve been asked to come up with a plausible way of getting a fictional crew from one star to another, but laser sails and fusion rockets won’t do. The target might be thousands of light years away, so you have...
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Starship Thinking
It's been awhile since I've seen Ian Crawford (Birkbeck College, London) -- I think we last talked at one of the 100 Year Starship events -- but I'm pleased to see his latest popular essay How to build a starship - and why we should start thinking about it now. A...
The Initiative for Interstellar Studies: A Three Year Update
Kelvin Long is chief editor of the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society and the author of Deep Space Propulsion (Springer, 2011). A founder and first project leader of Project Icarus, the ongoing re-design of the Project Daedalus starship, Kelvin is also a...
Starship Detection: The K2 Perspective
'Classical' SETI, if I can use that term, is based on studying the electromagnetic spectrum primarily in the radio wavelengths thought most likely to be used for communication by an extraterrestrial civilization. SETI's optical component is largely focused on...
Closing Out 100YSS: Antimatter, Gravitational Lensing & a Modified Orion
I don't envy the track chairs at any conference, particularly conferences that are all about getting large numbers of scientists into the right place at the right time. Herding cats? But the track model makes inherent sense when you're dealing with widely disparate...
100YSS: An Encouraging Future for Sails
India can take great pride in the successful insertion of its Mangalyaan Mars probe into orbit around the red planet. At a cost of $75 million, the spacecraft is a bargain -- Maven, which entered Mars orbit on Sunday, cost almost ten times as much. In an Associated...
100YSS: SETI, Sprites and Cutting Costs
Gatherings like the 100 Year Starship Symposium have tough organizational choices to make, and the solutions aren't always obvious. A good part of any aerospace conference is involved in presenting papers, but do you set up a multi-track system or take a single-track...
Starships on Earth
Building a starship takes us along an evolutionary path as we master the myriad methods of its creation. And the process does not start at some arbitrary point in the future. Rather, it begins now as we put today's technologies to work in the service of new concepts....
Starships: Sentient Habitats
Librarian and futurist Heath Rezabek has become a familiar figure on Centauri Dreams through his writings on existential risk and how our species might counter it through Vessels, installations conveying our planet's biological and cultural identity. The Vessel...
Starship Century Symposium, London
Oxford-based Stephen Ashworth, who attended the recent Starship Century event in London, obviously took copious notes, as reflected in the piece that follows. Ashworth is a Centauri Dreams regular, a writer and musician who, like so many of us on this site, ponders...