The idea of 'deep time' exerts an abiding fascination. H.G. Wells took us forward to a remote futurity when his time traveler looked out on a beach dominated by a red and swollen Sun. But of course deep time goes in the other direction as well. I can remember wanting to become a paleontologist when I discovered books about the world of the dinosaurs, my mind reeling from the idea that the world these creatures lived in was as remote as any distant star. Paleontology was a grade-school ambition I never followed up on, but the Triassic and Jurassic eras still have a hold on my imagination. In a SETI context, deep time presents challenges galore. Charles Lineweaver's work offers up the prospect that the average Earth-like planet in our galactic neighborhood may well be far older than our own -- Lineweaver calculates something like an average of 1.8 billion years older. Would a civilization around such a star, if one could survive without destroying itself for so long, have anything it...
Re-Thinking The Antimatter Rocket
Once when reading Boswell's monumental life of the 18th Century writer and conversationalist Samuel Johnson, I commented to a friend how surprised I had been to discover that Johnson didn't spend much time reading in his later years. "He didn't need a lot of time," replied my friend, a classics professor. "He tore the heart out of books." That phrase stuck with me over the years and re-surfaced when I started working with Adam Crowl. More than anyone I know, Adam can get to the heart of a scientific paper and explain its pros and cons while someone like myself is still working through the introduction. And because of his fine work with Project Icarus, I thought Adam would be just the person to explain the latest thinking about a classic concept that Friedwardt Winterberg would like to take to the next level. by Adam Crowl In Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon, the bold Frenchman Michel Ardan, in his first speech to the Baltimore Gun Club, when discussing travelling to the Moon...
Correction re WISE
Last week I reported on information from a source on the WISE mission that no new red dwarfs had yet been discovered out to a distance of 10 light years. This past weekend I received an email from my source apologizing for mis-typing. He had meant to say no brown dwarfs -- not red dwarfs -- out to a distance of 10 light years. And as I mentioned with the earlier post, the data analysis continues and there may be surprises yet to come. A nearby brown dwarf is something I've been writing about here for some time, pondering its implications and wondering whether one might actually turn up that was closer than the Alpha Centauri stars. So the news is that no brown dwarfs matching the description have yet turned up, but the hunt continues.