by A. A. Jackson Although it was probably science fiction that got Al Jackson into interstellar flight, he remembers discovering the work of Eugen Sänger back around 1960 and becoming energized to seek out the few scientific papers on relativistic rocket designs that were then available. With a firm background in engineering, he turned to physics in 1975, receiving a PhD from the University of Texas at Austin, a natural move for a man who had worked for NASA during the heyday of Apollo as astronaut trainer on the Lunar Module Simulator. Going through Al’s papers is a fascinating exercise in its own right, but I was reminded because of our recent articles on Robert Bussard’s ramjet ideas that Al had worked with Daniel Whitmire. Bussard spoke about fusing protons in his ramscoop engine, but subsequent analysis showed that the power needed to compress protons to fusion densities far outweighed the power that would be produced. It was Daniel Whitmire who developed the ‘catalytic ramjet’...

It's fascinating to watch how expansive ideas take hold in the public imagination. The idea of a starship that could scoop up particles from the interstellar medium came to Robert Bussard while he was at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory and, as we saw recently in our articles on slowing down a starship, became the basis for subsequent magsail concepts because Bussard's design evidently generates far more drag than effective thrust. But before the problems of the design became widely known, Walter Sullivan, a writer for the New York Times, had brought the ramjet into play for future human journeys to the stars in a book called We Are Not Alone (definitely not the same book as the 2011 title by Dirk Schulze-Makuch). Subtitled 'The Continuing Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence' in its latest revision, the original 1964 book was written at a time when SETI was an infant discipline (although the later revision goes through the Drake equation and places SETI in the context of...

I once thought about putting together a collection of classic papers on interstellar flight. It would start with early work by the likes of Les Shephard, Eugen Sänger and Carl Wiley (whose groundbreaking paper on solar sails appeared not in a scientific journal but in Astounding Science Fiction). The book would proceed with the key papers of Forward, Bussard and Dyson and move into papers from the Project Daedalus report, then to Matloff and Mallove and up to the present day, with a long look at the Italian solar sail work of Vulpetti, Maccone and Genta. Especially later in this period there is abundant material to choose from, and there's Alcubierre to consider, and Millis' work with the Breakthrough Propulsion Physics project. And then there's Geoff Landis and Robert Frisbee and the closely reasoned sociological analyses of Michael Michaud and... Well, you can see what happens when you start pondering editing possibilities. The book is already growing to enormous size and I've done...

It's shaping up to be an interesting week. I want to get to the recent Kepler data release, and also to the antimatter news from CERN, and I also want to talk about everything from decelerating an interstellar craft to models of expansion into the galaxy a la Frank Tipler. [And thanks to Centauri Dreams reader Eric Goldstein for reminding me of the upcoming WISE data release on the 14th!]. For today, though, let's look at two upcoming conferences, especially since I'm running behind in getting to the first of them, the CONTACT 2012 gathering, which is coming up right away. The full title of this one is CONTACT: Cultures of the Imagination, and it's a meeting with a rich history. Back in 1979, Jim Funaro was teaching a course in anthropology at Cabrillo College (Aptos, CA) that used science fiction as a vector into the scientific issues his course raised. The course allowed students to go to work creating cultures and, in a game-like simulation, to explore how the fictional societies...

Physicist Al Jackson, who is the world's greatest dinner companion, holds that title because amongst his scientific accomplishments, he is also a fountainhead of information about science fiction. No matter which writer you bring up, he knows something you never heard of that illuminates that writer's work. So it was no surprise that when the subject of self-replicating probes came up in these pages, Al would take note in the comments of Philip K. Dick's story "Autofac," which ran in the November, 1955 issue of H. L. Gold's Galaxy. A copy of that issue sits, I am happy to say, not six feet away from me on my shelves. This is actually the first time I ever anticipated Al -- like him, I had noticed "Autofac" as one of the earliest science fiction treatments of the ideas of self-replication and nanotechnology, and had written about it in my Centauri Dreams book back in 2004. If any readers know of earlier SF stories on the topic, please let me know in the comments. In the story, the two...