Tau Zero's founding architect brings news of a recent European Union meeting that included starships and their implications on the agenda. Here's hoping that while he was there he also had the chance to sample some of those fabulous Belgian ales... by Marc Millis The European Union recently held a conference to collect information to plan for the coming decades of science and technology priorities. This included the theme of international collaboration and the implications for all humanity across the globe. As a part of this conference, the EU organizers invited Mae Jemison of the 100 Year Starship organization to chair a session about interstellar flight. Mae rounded up a suite of speakers including Buzz Aldrin (a genuine space celebrity), Jill Tarter (SETI), Lou Friedman (solar sail advocate and former Planetary Society director), Kathryn Denning (space anthropologist), Pam Contag (microbiologist), Marc Millis (propulsion physicist), and about half-dozen more. Image: Outside the...

Jules Verne once had the notion of a comet grazing the Earth and carrying off a number of astounded people, whose adventures comprise the plot of the 1877 novel Off on a Comet. It's a great yarn that was chosen by Hugo Gernsback to be reprinted as a serial in the first issues of his new magazine Amazing Stories back in 1926, but with a diameter of 2300 kilometers, Verne's comet was much larger than anything we've actually observed. Comets tend to be small but they make up for it in volume, with an estimated 100 billion to several trillion thought to exist in the Oort Cloud. All that adds up to a total mass of several times the Earth's. Of course, coming up with mass estimates is, as with so much else about the Oort Cloud, a tricky business. Paul R. Weissman noted a probable error of about one order of magnitude when he produced the above estimate in 1983. What we are safe in saying is something that has caught Freeman Dyson's attention: While most of the mass and volume in the galaxy...

by Kelvin F. Long The chief editor of the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society here offers part II of his article on the Society's history. If there is one BIS project that captures the imagination above all others, it's surely Project Daedalus, the ambitious attempt to design a spacecraft capable of reaching a nearby star within 50 years. But the motivations for Daedalus were wide-ranging and the conclusions of the study may surprise you. The success of the design effort showed us what was possible with the technology of its time, while subsequent studies like Project Icarus upgrade the vessel and take us that much closer to what may one day be a working craft. Les Shepherd took things to new heights with the publication of his seminal 1952 paper "Interstellar Flight". This was the first paper ever to properly address the physics and engineering issues associated with sending a probe to another star and it is what I regard as the beginning of interstellar studies as a...

by Kelvin F.Long Centauri Dreams readers will know Kelvin Long as the Chief Editor for the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, but the résumé hardly stops there. He is also the Deputy Chair of the BIS Technical Committee and a member of the governing council. Long is the co-founder of Project Icarus, co-founder of the non-profit Icarus Interstellar (formerly serving as the Vice President European Operations) and is the co-founder of the pending Institute for Interstellar Studies. He is the managing Director of the aerospace company Stellar Engines Ltd. Here Kelvin begins a two-part article (to be completed on Monday) highlighting the British Interplanetary Society and its numerous contributions to spaceflight concepts both interplanetary and interstellar. Liverpool is a unique location in British history. Not just because of the Beatles or Olaf Stapledon, but because this is where the British Interplanetary Society (BIS) was founded in 1933 by a Cheshire-born...

Centauri Dreams is happy to welcome Dr. Cameron M. Smith, a prehistorian at Portland State University's Department of Anthropology in Portland, OR, with an essay that is the capstone of this week's worldship theme. Dr. Smith began his career excavating million-year-old stone tools in Africa and today combines his archaeological interests with a consideration of human evolution and space colonization. He is applying this interest in his collaboration with the scientists at Icarus Interstellar's Project Hyperion, a reference study for an interstellar craft capable of voyaging to a distant star. Recently Dr. Smith presented a paper at the NASA/DARPA '100 Year Starship Study' conference in Houston, Texas. His recent popular science publications in this field include "Starship Humanity" (Scientific American 2013) and the book Emigrating Beyond Earth: Human Adaptation and Space Colonization (Springer-Praxis, 2013). We can look forward to a follow-up article to this one in coming weeks. by...

The assumptions we bring to interstellar flight shape the futures we can imagine. It's useful, then, to question those assumptions at every turn, particularly the one that says the reason we will go to the stars is to find other planets like the Earth. The thought is natural enough, and it's built into the exoplanet enterprise, for the one thing we get excited about more than any other is the prospect of finding small, rocky worlds at about Earth's distance from a Sun-like star. This is what Kepler is all about. From an astrobiological perspective, this focus makes sense, as we want to know whether there is other life -- particularly intelligent life -- in the universe. But interstellar expansion may not involve terrestrial-class worlds at all, though they would still remain the subject of intense study. Let's assume for a moment that a future human civilization expands to the stars in worldships that take hundreds or even thousands of years to reach their destination. The occupants...

Those of us who are fascinated with interstellar travel would love to see a probe to another star launched within our lifetime. But maybe we're in the position of would be flyers in the 17th Century. They could see birds wheeling above them and speculate on how humans might create artificial wings, but powered flight was still centuries ahead. Let's hope that's not the case with interstellar flight, but in the absence of any way of knowing, let's continue to attack the foundational problems one by one in hopes of building up the needed technologies. Marc Millis, who ran NASA's Breakthrough Propulsion Physics project at the end of the 20th Century, always points out in his talks that picking this or that propulsion technology as the 'only' way to get to the stars is grossly premature. In a recent interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Antony Funnell, Millis joined physicist and science fiction writer Gregory Benford, Icarus Interstellar president Richard Obousy and...