The other day on the hugely enjoyable Galactic Journey site, I ran into an interesting historical tidbit. Here, from the 1753 Cyclopædia: or, An Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences by Ephraim Chambers is a definition of the word 'interstellar.' And with a modernized presentation: "Interstellar, is a word used by some authors to express those parts of the universe that are without and beyond our Solar system; in which are supposed to several other systems of planets moving around the fixed stars as the centers of their respective motions: and if it be true, as it is not improbable, that each fixed star is thus a sun to some habitable orbs, that move round it, the interstellar world will be infinitely the greater part of the universe." Another early instance of planetary systems around other stars in wide circulation at an early date. Chambers was working for John Senex, a London-based globe-maker, when he conceived the plan for his Cyclopædia, a project to which he soon devoted...

Hurricane Matthew's effects continue to be felt in the form of flooding, power outages and downed trees. I'm now told not to expect power for 4-6 days. The situation obviously impacts my ability to post here. I'll try to keep up with comment moderation when possible. Will get things back to normal whenever the lights come back on.

No Centauri Dreams posts this week -- I'll be back next Monday. I've been running hard and it's time for a break. I'll keep up with comment moderation as best I can, though I'm going to be trying to catch up with many long overdue commitments outside the interstellar field in coming days. As always, thanks to all for the continuing support. See you soon!

I'm at the Breakthrough Starshot meetings in San Francisco, with a full schedule indeed. As I did last time in Palo Alto, I won't try to post daily because there just won't be time, and in any case, I will need to go over my notes and consolidate my impressions. Even so, I plan to slip something interesting in here in the near future (keep an eye on Wednesday afternoon EDT), and will try to keep comment moderation active, though probably on a more infrequent basis than usual. Next week I'll report in on what happened at the committee level at Breakthrough Starshot.

My plan to attend the Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop this week fell through when I became ill two days before departure date. Talk about bad timing. TVIW is a wonderful conference, and not only was my son Miles flying in for the event, but I had planned many good conversations with friends in the interstellar community. I was also looking forward to the Homo Stellaris working track led by Robert Hampson. I've been at all previous TVIWs and deeply regret having missed this one. I'm hoping for a less foggy mind by tomorrow, at which point I'll resume the schedule here, which is four or five posts per week unless interrupted by travel. Complicating this past few days has been a server migration which apparently went well (this, thankfully, was out of my hands), and the need for a PHP upgrade, which should be occurring by the end of the week. Fingers crossed, I am hoping for no disruption. I'll hope to get some reports from TVIW and pass along links to presentations from the...

As mentioned in Friday's post, I'm taking a week off. The next regular Centauri Dreams post will be on Monday the 26th. In the interim, I'll check in daily for comment moderation. When I get back, we'll be starting off with a closer at Jason Wright's recent paper out of the Glimpsing Heat from Alien Technologies project at Penn State, with a focus on interesting transiting lightcurve signatures and how to distinguish SETI candidates from natural phenomena.

I'm at the Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop in Oak Ridge for the next few days. As I've done at past conferences, I'll need to spend my time taking the notes that will be turned into next week's entries here. That means no further posts until Friday, though I'll try to keep the comment moderation going, perhaps with a few delays. TVIW 2014 has lined up a good group of speakers including, besides MSFC's Les Johnson himself (TVIW's founder), exoplanet hunter Sara Seager, beamed sail specialist Jim Benford, the SETI League's Paul Shuch and TZF founder Marc Millis, along with a healthy representation from Icarus Interstellar. I'm also looking forward to the workshop tracks and will be participating in one called "Language as Reality: A Near-Term Roadmap for Exploiting Opportunities and Natural Experiments Here on Terra Firma to Inform *C*ETI." Expect a complete report when I get back.

A long time ago in what now seems like a different lifetime, a colleague told me that the best parts of any conference were the accidental encounters in the hallways where you ran into old friends or people whose work you knew about but hadn't yet met. That was back when I was going to conferences about medieval literature rather than starships, but the lesson holds. There were almost too many such encounters at the 100 Year Starship 2014 Symposium in Houston to count, and it seemed that around every corner was a chance to exchange ideas and opinions. There were also enough tracks and ongoing events that it was impossible to get everything in. Claudio Maccone and I always get together, and when I saw him crossing the lobby of the Hilton Americas hotel, I intercepted him to see if he wanted to join a group of us for dinner. But Claudio was headed for a screening of the 1951 version of The Day the Earth Stood Still, a film he had never seen, and I could hardly ask him to turn down the...

Over the past months, enough projects have piled up in need of attention that I finally have to decide to get serious about them. That means a short break here. No Centauri Dreams posts this week, therefore, with publication resuming next week on Monday or Tuesday. While I'm putting various things -- some space-related, some not -- in order, I'll try to keep up with comment moderation, though it may get sporadic for a time. Meanwhile, do keep plugging into Heath Rezabek's book survey as we try to isolate not only what books from my shortlist are the most useful, but also search for books you think should be on the list. Please add any titles you think worthwhile in the space provided on the survey form. I look forward to watching this survey grow, and to Heath's reflections on it once it has grown to sufficient size. See you in a week.

Following last week's highly successful Starship Century conference, I'm looking forward to the Starship Congress coming up in August under the auspices of Icarus Interstellar. Be aware that there is a Kickstarter campaign now in place to support the event and the organization. From the description: Icarus Interstellar, a non-profit organization dedicated to achieving interstellar spaceflight by the end of the century, will facilitate such a forum as a means for allowing individuals to present and share knowledge and ideas among colleagues within the space exploration community. As an organization run by volunteers, Icarus Interstellar is reaching out to space enthusiasts and supporters to assist in funding this important event, which will incur significant expenses pertaining to venue rental, A/V technical requirements, live streaming of the conference, featured guest speaker travel procurement, and marketing. I've just made my own contribution and hope you'll consider doing the...

I've gotten so used to thinking 'maybe this will be the year when the first Alpha Centauri planet is discovered' that I almost said it again about 2013. Fortunately, we already have a (still unconfirmed) Centauri B b, and the latest I've heard is that it may take five years or so before we can say something definitive about a planet in a habitable zone orbit around our neighboring system. So the coming year may not be the year of Alpha Centauri, but we can expect exoplanet news in abundance as the various teams continue their work, and plenty of activity from the organizations now working to advance the idea of interstellar flight through papers, conferences and commentary. Let me wish all Centauri Dreams readers the best for a dazzling new trip around the Sun.

Martin Beech has written a superb summary of Alpha Centauri studies for the Royal Astronomical Society's journal Astronomy and Geophysics, covering recent work up to and including the discovery of planet candidate Centauri B b. A fine holiday gift! I had been hoping to write it up this morning, but Christmas events, not least of which is the need for some last minute shopping, have made that impossible. So I'll save this impressive work for later in the week. In the meantime, let me wish all Centauri Dreams readers best wishes for a joyous holiday season. See you in a few days.

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.

Best holiday wishes to all from Centauri Dreams. I'm now going on an abbreviated schedule, with no post today or on Monday. I'll follow the same pattern next week as we close in on the New Year. The next regular post, then, will appear Tuesday December 27, and we'll see what interesting news items accumulate between now and then. Let me also add thanks to the entire readership for high-quality comments all through 2011 that have focused our discussions and opened up new insights on interstellar topics. Here's to holiday cheer, good companionship and breakthrough ideas.

It hasn't escaped my attention that in the past seven years, I've taken no more than a couple of days off at a time from writing Centauri Dreams posts. Now that the doldrums of summer are here in the northern hemisphere, it seems a good time to take a somewhat longer break. Not that I'll stay away if something major happens -- if Debra Fischer announces rocky worlds around Centauri B, for example, I'll be all over the story. But a week off will provide the chance to reflect, recharge, and get in some backed up but necessary reading. I'll plan to have the next Centauri Dreams post up, then, some time next week, probably by the 27th, and then back to normal.

Tau Zero practitioners should be aware that deadlines on the following solicitations are approaching quickly: (1) NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) - Early Stage Innovation DEADLINE for Notices of Intent: 29-March-2011 (Just 7 workdays away) DEADLINE for Proposals: 02-May-2011 (2) NASA Broad Agency Announcement (BAA): Technology Demonstration Missions (TDM) DEADLINE for Notices of Intent: 31-March-2011 (Just 9 workdays away) DEADLINE for Proposals: 31-May-2011 (3) NASA Broad Agency Announcement (BAA): Unique and Innovative Space Technology DEADLINE for Exec Summary: 30-Sept-2011 DEADLINE for White Paper: 01-Nov-2011 DEADLINE for Proposal: 03-Jan-2012

Update: As of 1611 UTC, the IKAROS blog is reporting "IKAROS state has been confirmed to be good." More images and data are in the works, but we're not likely to see anything until tomorrow. It's getting late in Japan (2306 JST as I write, or 1406 UTC), and although a JAXA tweet promised new photos for today, the IKAROS blog is still showing the same deployment image we looked at yesterday. More as it becomes available and, naturally, I'm also following the fortunes of Hayabusa, now on final approach to the Woomera Test Range in South Australia. Re-entry is targeted for June 13. Meanwhile, I'm holding on a story (not on IKAROS) that comes off embargo this afternoon and will be posting today's main entry in a few hours.

And I thought I was going to more or less take the weekend off, maybe finishing up a second reading of Rare Earth and enjoying some of the delightful spring weather that has taken hold around here. So much for that. Server issues caused this site to be transferred to a new server, which subsequently brought the whole site down. When it came back up, most of my customizations were gone and I haven't yet figured out how to get them back. It's been a long day and I'm not sure how long this is going to take, so please bear with me. It seems more important to get the site up and running again even if it's suddenly in a minimalist guise. I'll tune it back up as time permits.

Several interesting items in the news today but I won't be able to get to them, try as I might. I'm just coming off surgery yesterday (minor), and although I'm otherwise fine, the pain medication I'm taking makes me so groggy that I hesitate to post. So bear with me until tomorrow, when I should have a new item up some time in the afternoon.

Best wishes to all for a wonderful 2008, and thanks beyond the telling to the numerous readers who participated in our discussions in the year past. There will be no post on New Year's day, but we'll get back to the normal schedule on the afternoon of January 2. Have a wonderful holiday.