Centauri Dreams has little use for pessimism. The operative assumption in these precincts is that humanity will muddle through somehow and eventually get to the stars, whether in a matter of centuries or millennia. But it's always good to have a backup plan in the event of catastrophe, which is what the Norwegian government has been working on. Who knows when some rogue asteroid like 99942 Apophis may beat the odds and fall, with shattering results, to Earth? The Svalbard International Seed Vault has the aim of protecting the world's agriculture in a vast seed bank, one that would house three million seed samples. Collecting and maintaining the seeds is the Global Crop Diversity Trust, whose executive director, Cary Fowler, likened the vault to a safety net in a recent BBC story, saying "Can you imagine an effective, efficient, sustainable response to climate change, water shortages, food security issues without what is going to go in the vault - it is the raw material of...

It's hard to believe that Sir Patrick Moore started his astronomy program The Sky at Night fifty years ago. Since then, BBC viewers have known where to turn for a view of things celestial, one with that particular Moore mix of savvy and amiable, eccentric enthusiasm that comes across so well in his many books. So what a pleasure to see that a set of stamps has now gone on sale honoring his work. How else would you see interstellar scenery on an postal envelope? A news account in the Telegraph quotes Sir Patrick thus: "I feel deeply honoured. I would like to think that we have played a part in introducing astronomy to people who would otherwise have paid no real attention to the heavens. Many years hence, philatelists will still be admiring these stamps paying tribute, not to me, but to The Sky At Night." Can you imagine a show running for fifty years with the same host? I hate to disagree with the gentleman, having grown up reading his books, but the tribute future stamp admirers pay...

Centennaries are worth celebrating, especially when they involve people whose work advanced our understanding of reality. A big one comes up in 2008, about which this clue: "The views of space and time which I wish to lay before you have sprung from the soil of experimental physics, and therein lies their strength. They are radical. Henceforth space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality." The speaker is Hermann Minkowski (1864-1909), the German scientist and mathematician who didn't survive the 1908 presentation he began with these words by more than a few months (he died of appendicitis the following January). The talk, entitled Raum und Zeit, contains Minkowski's view that time and space must be understood together as a four dimensional concept called spacetime. That idea played a material role in furthering Einstein's later development of General Relativity. Indeed,...

Centauri Dreams has no idea how you quantify something as elusive as imagination, but if anyone should have a go at it, that man is Arthur C. Clarke. Thus the interesting news of the center being established in his name in Las Vegas. Its goal: "...to investigate the reach and impact of human imagination." The Clarke Foundation hopes to raise $70 million for the project, which Clarke says aims to "...accord imagination as much regard as high academic grades in the classroom - anywhere in the world." Exactly how this is done will be fascinating to see. It's good to learn that Sir Arthur's health is on the mend, and to hear him in this recent message on KurzweilAI.net talking about a rejuvenated space program: Notwithstanding the remarkable accomplishments during the past 50 years, I believe that the Golden Age of space travel is still ahead of us. Before the current decade is out, fee-paying passengers will be experiencing sub-orbital flights aboard privately funded passenger vehicles,...

The Astroprof's Page takes a look at the interesting star Gliese 710, a K7 dwarf with a particular claim to distinction: it's headed in the direction of our Sun at about 24 kilometers per second. Give it 1.4 million years and the star will have closed to within a light year of Sol, shining at a magnitude of 1.2 and disturbing the icy debris out in the Oort Cloud. A rain of comets moving into the inner system is the probable result. Barnard's Star is moving towards us too, closing to within four light years around 10000 AD, but we needn't wait for a close stellar pass to start worrying about catastrophic collisions. As the battered surface of the Moon suggests, the Solar System can be a hostile place, making a space-based infrastructure to prevent future disaster an imperative.

Some years back, the fine space writer William E. Burrows helped to establish ARC, the Alliance to Rescue Civilization. ARC's purpose was to create an imperishable archive that would contain a record of our civilization in the event of catastrophe. Now a part of the Lifeboat Foundation, ARC envisioned making a 'backup' of the human experience, with the Moon as just one venue. In today's Wall Street Journal, Burrows looks at the dangers of returning to the Moon vs. staying home: It is therefore reasonable to ask whether such an incredibly expensive and dangerous undertaking is worth it. The answer is an unequivocal yes. But the truly compelling reason to build a lunar base is not for adventure, though there will be plenty of that. Nor is it to mine resources to gain riches, though that will eventually happen. The overriding reason to establish a colony on the moon is humanity's survival: Darwin achieves liftoff. Do we really need the current space station? Burrows says no -- we...

The sixth edition of Philosophia Naturalis is out, published by Charles Daney on his Science and Reason blog. It's a 'carnival' of interesting writing in the weblog format, pointing to writing by diverse and sundry authors on the physical sciences and technology. Carnivals like this one seem to be gaining popularity, a welcome thing because they offer pointers to sites I hadn't known about, and the topics are always interesting. Good coverage of the American Astronomical Society meeting shows up here, along with work on dark matter, the Antikythera Mechanism, and a wonderful explanation of light cones and Einsteinian relativity. I'm pleased that Philosophia Naturalis includes two recent posts on the James Webb Space Telescope from these pages.