Night Flight to Italy I'm off tomorrow night to Italy, specifically to the Sixth IAA Symposium on Realistic Near-Term Advanced Scientific Space Missions. I'll be delivering a talk at the conference and a public lecture in the town of Aosta and, assuming a robust Internet connection, I'll also be sending along news of the conference as it unfolds. I'm looking forward particularly to catching up with Giancarlo Genta, Greg Matloff and wife C Bangs, and Claudio Maccone, and it will be great to touch base again with Les Johnson, whom I haven't seen since we talked at Marshall Space Flight Center in 2003. Superluminal Radio Waves and their Uses An article in the Santa Fe New Mexican discusses the work of John Singleton, a physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, who has created a 'polarization synchrotron,' which according to the report pushes radio waves faster than the speed of light. In a paper on this work, Singleton explains that: ...though no superluminal source of...

Is the movement toward ever more sophisticated technology irreversible? If you've studied history, the answer is obviously no. Various speculations arise from this -- Carl Sagan once opined that without the intervening collapse known as the Dark Ages, we might have seen a Greek civilization exploring near-Earth space a thousand years ago. It's also likely that no law prevents another collapse into technological and scientific somnolence, perhaps sparked by war, or disease, or economic catastrophe. This is why I always hedge my bets when asked about timetables for space exploration. How long until we get humans to the outer system? How long until we launch a fast starship? Everyone is in a hurry, but so much depends on whether we keep growing our technology. Nanotechnology, for example, could change everything, but it's one thing to be using molecular assemblers by the end of the century, and quite another to see the fruition of this work stalled for a millennium by external events....