I've played around a bit with Bluesky in the past, but have now decided it's time to make a move. Those of you who have been following the site on X will want to know about the change, as posted in my first new Bluesky 'skeet' in some time. The change in user experience is striking, a bit like walking in an alpine meadow after spending years in a subway car. Not that I have anything against subways... Have decided to move to BlueSky for good, having left X for obvious reasons. Future posts from my Centauri Dreams site will be linked here. Current post considers Clément Vidal's striking concept for using millisecond pulsars to move entire stellar systems. www.centauri-dreams.org/2024/11/14/a...[image or embed]— Paul Gilster (@gilster.bsky.social) November 16, 2024 at 8:30 AM

No posts this week, as I am wrapping up an overhaul of some of the site's internals. When I say 'I,' I really mean my brilliant web guru, whose team has worked tirelessly to fix a major problem with the archives. The problem has to do with special characters of the sort used often in scientific papers. An upgrade to the site software some months back caused many of these to render improperly, and fixing what seemed a simple issue has proven extraordinarily complex. As best I can tell, we now have about 85 percent of the problem solved, and the changes will be implemented in a few days. After that, I will be identifying and fixing the remainder one by one. There are reasons for the baroque nature of this procedure, but they're too complicated to explain here. Please keep the comments coming, as I'll continue to moderate them as these changes are being put into place.

“It seems that destiny has taken a hand.” Thus Humphrey Bogart, in a pivotal scene from the iconic 1942 film Casablanca. In Bogart’s case, destiny had to do with the sudden arrival of Claude Rains and the gendarmerie at Rick's Café Américain, with profound implications for his relationship with Ilsa. In my case, fate was more jejune, involving the failure of my PC’s power supply just as I was asking myself whether it was now time for my August vacation. The power supply left little doubt. Surely a sign from the cosmos that after all the recent work reconfiguring the site's software, I should take some time off? That’s how I plan to interpret it, in any case. In the meantime, I’ll get the PC problem resolved. As to the still developing work on the site, a couple of things to note: 1) I am all too aware that the mobile experience is problematic, depending on what phone you use. I find this bewildering, as many people see the site correctly on their phones, whereas people like me see a...

Those of you who follow Centauri Dreams through email probably received an inadvertent test post this morning. My apologies. The post was triggered by work on the site's internals and was generated automatically by the email software module. Work on the site continues, but I think the email issue is fixed, so I anticipate no more of these. Thanks for your patience.

Centauri Dreams began as a website back in August of 2004. I’m startled to realize, looking through the stats that my site’s software provides, that in the subsequent nineteen years, there have been 4,659 posts, along with close to 100,000 comments. The irony is that I started the site simply as a research venue for myself, thinking to keep up with the latest news by building a collection of articles and scientific papers. It took about a year before I even switched on the comments function. One of the benefits of publishing for such a length of time is perspective, as the interstellar research scene has grown and changed over the past two decades. But one thing I didn’t do is keep up with the software. Always focused on content, I’ve kept writing but have let too many generations of internal programming stay mired in older iterations. The dangers of this are obvious. A site with obsolete internals is all too open to hacking. And now, completely normal upgrades to some of the site’s...

The preliminary program for the Interstellar Research Group’s 8th Interstellar Symposium in Montreal is now available. For those of you heading to the event, I want to add that the early bird registration period for attending at a discount is May 31. Registration fees go up after that date. Registering at the conference hotel can be handled here. Registration before the 31st is recommended to get a room within the block reserved for IRG.

I was saddened to learn of the recent death of James Early, author of a key paper on interstellar sail missions and a frequent attendee at IRG events (or TVIW, as the organization was known when I first met him). Jim passed away on April 28 in Saint George, UT at the age of 80, a well-liked figure in the interstellar community and a fine scientist. I wish I had known him better. I ran into him for the first time in a slightly awkward way, which Jim, ever the gentleman, quickly made light of. What happened was this. In 2012 I was researching damage that an interstellar sail mission might experience in the boost phase of its journey. Somewhere I had seen what I recall as a color image in a magazine (OMNI?) showing a battered, torn sail docked in what looked to be a repair facility at the end of an interstellar crossing. It raised the obvious question: If we did get a sail up to, say, 5% of the speed of light, wouldn’t even the tiniest particles along the way create significant damage...

I'm going to need to take some time off, a decision prompted by responsibilities outside the interstellar community that have grown to the point where I lack the time to maintain a consistent schedule on the site. I'll keep moderating comments as usual, and I have some first-rate essays coming up from other authors, but my own writing is going to have to be sporadic for the time being. Long-term, I plan to keep Centauri Dreams active for a long time, so bear with me. As soon as I can do it, I will get back to a more consistent schedule. For now, though, expect a slower pace of new posts from me.

The redirection of Centauri Dreams posts for those of you who subscribe via email is just about finished. My apologies to those readers who received two different email copies of recent posts. We're fixing that issue right now and I hope we'll be finalized within a day or two. The changeover has been necessitated because of Google's decision to stop supporting the Feedburner service that had previously supplied content via email.

Google will no longer be supporting its email distribution service as of July 1, and I am preparing for this through the work of my friend Frank Taylor, who is fine-tuning a replacement. However, I've had a few reports already of emails not being delivered. So if you are an email subscriber to Centauri Dreams, please bear with us as Frank gets the new service up and running. This may take a few more days. There will be no need to re-subscribe, as the existing subscription list will be transferred to the new feed.

The Wow! signal has a storied history in the SETI community, a one-off detection at the Ohio State 'Big Ear' observatory in 1977 that Jim Benford, among others, considers the most interesting candidate signal ever received. A plasma physicist and CEO of Microwave Sciences, Benford returns to Centauri Dreams today with a closer look at the signal and its striking characteristics, which admit to a variety of explanations, though only one that the author believes fits all the parameters. A second reception of the Wow! might tell us a great deal, but is such an event likely? So far all repeat observations have failed and, as Benford points out, there may be reason to assume they must. The essay below is a shorter version of the paper Jim has submitted to Astrobiology. by James Benford In 1977 the Big Ear radio telescope (Ohio State University Radio Telescope) recorded the famous Wow! Signal, which is the most serious contender for artificial interstellar radiation. It is called the...

I'm going to keep Alex Tolley's fine essay (below) at the top for another day, in hopes of re-starting the comment thread that was going along so nicely before the site went down. Then tomorrow we'll start talking about gravitational lensing, in the first of a series that may extend until next week.

Centauri Dreams was launched as a website in 2004 for a specific reason. I was wrapping up my book of the same name and wanted to build a simple database of news stories related to the angles on interstellar flight I had covered in the book. I intended the site to be used for no other purpose, and didn't turn on the comments function until a year after the site went live. My plans were for a second edition of the book, but I began to realize as the website grew that to avoid instant obsolescence, the Web was my best friend. This site, then, began serving as a de facto second edition and I've kept it running now for 15 years. Sometimes I'm asked how long I plan to keep the site going, and the answer is simply that I plan to be here for years to come. I have no thoughts about closing down Centauri Dreams. But as my work in the space community has grown, I've also become involved in various other aerospace efforts to which I've contributed, and right now I'm in the midst of a report on...

And boy do I need it! See you in two weeks.

6th Interstellar Symposium and Interstellar Propulsion Workshop - TVIW 2019 In collaboration with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop (TVIW) hereby invites participation in its 6th Interstellar Symposium and Interstellar Propulsion Workshop -hosted by Wichita State University (WSU) and Ad Astra Kansas Foundation - to be held from Sunday, November 10 through Friday, November 15, 2019, in Wichita, Kansas. The 2019 TVIW has the following elements: The NASA Workshop on Interstellar Propulsion will focus solely on physics-based propulsion technologies that have the potential to meet the goal of launching an interstellar probe within the next century and achieving .1c transit velocity: Beamed Energy Propulsion, Fusion, and Antimatter. At this meeting, the state-of-the-art of each will be examined, competing approaches to advancing the Technology Readiness Level (TRL) of each will be presented by advocates and assessed by...

Centauri Dreams posts will unfortunately be sporadic over the next couple of weeks as I attend to some unrelated matters. But I do have several excellent upcoming articles already in the pipeline, including Al Jackson on Apollo 8 at the end of this week. Al, you'll recall, was involved in Apollo as astronaut trainer on the Lunar Module Simulator, so his thoughts on the program's extraordinary successes are always a high point. Image credit: Manchu. Ashley Baldwin, who knows the ins and outs of space-based astronomy better than anyone I know, will be looking at the key issues involved, with specific reference not only to WFIRST and HabEX but also a mission called EXCEDE, not currently approved but very likely the progenitor of something like it to come. In early January, Jim Benford will be talking about beamed propulsion in a two-part article that looks to resolve key particle beam issues, with methods worked out by himself and the ingenious Alan Mole. There are all kinds of...

Dave Brubeck's Time Out album was the first jazz LP I ever bought, just after it came out in 1959, the same year that Miles Davis released Kind of Blue. Watershed moments both. Paul Desmond once said of his alto sax work that he was trying to create the sound of a dry martini, a description I certainly can't top. Last night, while listening to Desmond and Brubeck, I realized that the Time Out album would be emblematic for today's post. For it's that time of year, and I am indeed taking time out for a much needed break. Centauri Dreams will be back in the first week of August, but until then, my break will include a good bit of jazz, much catch-up reading, a lot of long walks and, perhaps, a few of those martinis Desmond talks about. I'll keep an eye on the site to handle comment moderation as well. Meanwhile, I hope all of you are having a splendid summer.

Some of you may have noticed a blip in the comments moderation over the past 24 hours. I think all messages have now come through, but a software upgrade on my server is the culprit. Things seem to have gone back to normal now. On an unrelated matter, I won't be able to get off a post today or tomorrow. On Tuesday, I'll have some interesting information about Breakthrough Starshot. [I had originally promised this for Monday, having forgotten about the US holiday].

Several readers have told me that their email deliveries of Centauri Dreams have not been coming through. This has been an on-again, off-again problem for some time and I'm now trying to switch providers to take care of it. Bear with me, as I hope to have the problem resolved within a few days.

An interruption that can't be avoided. I never realized that so many non-Centauri Dreams obligations were about to converge this fall, but it's now clear I won't be able to keep the site stocked with new stories for the next couple of weeks. I'll do my best to keep up with comment moderation during this period, though there may be interruptions. See you later in the month when things get a bit more normal.