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.
Merry Christmas! And for those who celebrate other holidays — or none at all — best wishes for the season. Centauri Dreams will not publish on December 25. Normal publication resumes on the afternoon of the 26th.
It's been a long night. A bug in one of our security software plugins caused all users to run into problems when trying to post messages. Sorry about this! I think I've finally resolved the matter and you should find things back to normal. If you tried to post and were unable to get site access, please try again, and thanks for your patience.
"The Future of the Vision for Space Exploration" is the title of a panel I'll be moderating tomorrow in Washington DC. In fact, by the time you read this, I should be in transit and looking forward to renewing several good friendships. It's the first session of the Seed/Schering-Plough Science + Society breakfast series, taking place in the House Energy and Commerce Committee Room on Capitol Hill, the goal being to discuss our future in space for an audience of policymakers and Congressional staffers. The event's organizers have lined up quite a panel: Louis Friedman, executive director of The Planetary Society and long-term advocate of a sound and far-reaching space policy, with extensive background at JPL and experience on missions ranging from Mariner to Voyager and Galileo. Steven Squyres, principal investigator for the science payload on the Mars Exploration Rover project, co-investigator on several other Mars missions including the 2009 Mars Science Laboratory, and member of...
Some of you have reported getting only a summary rather than the full text from the Centauri Dreams RSS feed today. I think the problem is fixed, but if it persists, please let me know. Ah, the joys of administration...
Almost exactly a year ago, I posted a story called A Practical Positron Rocket, about Gerald Smith's work at Positronics Research on a positron reactor. Antimatter is always a hot topic, given its potential for remarkably powerful engines and its implications for deep space work, but the post in question generated responses that ranged far beyond antimatter into numerous other potential solutions to the propulsion problem. Which is fine, but we may be encountering a bug in Wordpress which is keeping more recent comments from appearing properly. I haven't been able to confirm this, but I suspect that once comments for a given post reach a certain size limit, odd things begin to occur. In any case, I've had some anecdotal evidence (not just here) that this is the case. This post, then, is for those of you who want to keep the 'Practical Positron Rocket' thread running. Please use the comments section here to do so, and we'll retire the old post as a forum for comment.
Due to my own clumsiness with some needed spam filter adjustments, I've lost several moderated comments that I had intended to post today. If you submitted a comment within the last three hours that didn't appear, please re-submit, and sorry for the confusion!
Centauri Dreams will not publish on January 1. The regular publication schedule resumes on the afternoon of the 2nd. Happy New Year to all!
Merry Christmas! And for those of you who celebrate other holidays -- or none at all -- best wishes for the season. Centauri Dreams will not publish on December 24 or 25. The normal publication schedule resumes on the afternoon of the 26th.
The thread on active SETI -- broadcasting messages from Earth in a targeted way to other star systems -- has been an active and fruitful one. Unfortunately, I'm getting a few reports that recent attempts to post new comments haven't been successful. This may involve a size limit on comments to a single post; in any case, I haven't yet figured it out. So to continue any comments on the active SETI thread, please use the comment area for this post. And let me know if you have any problems posting, or if any comments you make don't appear. In the meantime, if any of you have any knowledge of size limits on WordPress comments to individual posts, please let me know. Sometimes software seems more mysterious than the interstellar realm; at least, it does to me after spending a couple of hours this morning trying to figure out what was going on in the depths of WordPress. My spam filter's behavior is also under active investigation.
The cleanup after the big splash continues. I am now working in an office that is more or less dry, with the help of constant dehumidifiers, but am inexplicably plagued by software problems that have shut down operations on one of my machines. Add to that a hardware glitch that surfaced just yesterday and it's clear that I may not be back at full speed today. It will probably take the weekend to get things sorted out -- I'm online, but there are lots of things that need doing here. Just moving books to drier ground is occupying plenty of time, though I'm glad to report little actual damage to anything important. On a different note, I'm hearing from some readers that commenting on Centauri Dreams stories is a problem. You have to register to comment, and although most people have done that without incident (and the comments duly appear), some have found that the software won't take their registration. I have no explanation for this and am hoping that someone more knowledgable about...
The remains of hurricane Alberto didn't seem terribly menacing as they approached North Carolina, and much of the state got no more than a good soaking. But here in Raleigh we were inundated with over 7 inches in a short period of time, leaving Centauri Dreams with a flooded office. I'm back online, but only just, and there is still a lot of cleaning up to do. Please bear with me and expect things to get back to normal in a day or so.
Nothing major, but I do have to do some necessary software upgrading, and beyond that, Centauri Dreams will probably switch to a new theme (which will affect its appearance) some time down the road. The new theme is needed to upgrade the search function, which works much better with the K2 theme than the older Kubrick theme that has run here since September. Expect no major changes, but as I do the first of several upgrades, be prepared for some quirks that I'll hope to iron out quickly.
Centauri Dreams was launched with the idea of providing the occasional commentary on space research with interstellar flight implications. What surprised this writer in the past fifteen months has been the fact that an 'occasional' schedule just doesn't work. The news coming in, from exoplanetary discoveries to new research directions in propulsion and robotics, has kept the publication schedule fast and furious. Centauri Dreams now publishes six days a week except for rare periods when I'm traveling (I don't carry a laptop). The recent hosting change went much more smoothly than I had anticipated, having read horror stories from other writers who had attempted such things. In fact, it was more or less glitch-free, and by now Google has combed out many of the duplicate entries still pointing to the old pages. Only two major issues remain to be addressed. Status of the archives. For a variety of reasons, I am transferring the articles from the old site's archives one at a time (this...
When I began the Centauri Dreams site in August of 2004, the motivation was utilitarian. I was looking for a way to keep up with ongoing research into deep space exploration, figuring it would be helpful to establish a site that followed news day by day and maintained it in a searchable archive. Centauri Dreams the Web site actually preceded my book of the same name by several months, and it was in the back of my mind to use research collected at the site in future writing projects. That motivation still exists. But something else happened in the intervening months. As readership grew, I found I was making new contacts in the research community, not just in the government agencies like NASA and ESA, but also in academic environments and commercial companies. Those contacts have been priceless, and have led to some fine friendships. And they've kept my eye on the main prize, which in my judgment is to put deep space research into the broader context of society's awareness of time. To...
Unless I am traveling, Centauri Dreams publishes Monday through Saturday. Entries are usually available by early afternoon EST, with the exception of the Friday and Saturday postings, which may appear later in the day. This schedule will occasionally be modified as events warrant. A lack of posts for several days running simply means I am on the road (I don't carry a computer when I travel).
Of the many contributions of Robert L. Forward to interstellar studies, the bibliography he produced with Eugene Mallove was one of the most useful to theorists in the field. The last appearance of the Forward/Mallove collaboration was in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society in 1980, including 2700 items in seventy subject categories; since then, anyone hoping to track ongoing research has been forced to do so one journal at a time, or else use online database sources that are in many cases incomplete and often do not include older materials. Image: The extraordinary Robert Forward, wearing one of the trademark vests created by his wife Martha. Forward chose this photograph to appear on his own Web site. One of my goals is to restore the interstellar bibliography to regular publication under the auspices of the Interstellar Flight Foundation. Many scientists recall Forward's antimatter newsletter, which circulated among a few hundred physicists for a brief period. In...
Searching the Internet has always been dicey, given the wide range of sites you're likely to pull up on any topic, and the varying degrees of quality each may bring. Google has done good work in restricting Web results -- its 'site-specific search,' for example, allows you to search within a universe of sites related to a particular topic. Now the company has gone one better with a new engine called Google Scholar, a test version of which is available. The beauty of Google Scholar is that your search is limited to journal articles, books, preprints, technical reports and theses, the kind of material serious researchers need to uncover without having to sift out all the chaff. As this article in Nature makes clear, the new service does a fine job at finding the relevant articles on your topic, using variations on the familiar Google algorithms that study the linking that takes place between Web pages and offer a key to their utility. But instead of studying links to other pages,...
Theoretical physicist Michio Kaku interviewed me for his public radio show Explorations last Thursday. The show is to run November 1, but I'm told that some of the public stations that carry it are currently doing their fund-raising, so the schedule may be thrown off. Dr. Kaku's Web page carries a list of stations, and the show will be available for download on the Web. Michio Kaku is is the co-founder of String Field Theory, and is the author of international best-selling books such as Hyperspace, Visions, and Beyond Einstein. He also holds the Henry Semat Professorship in Theoretical Physics at the City University of New York. Much of the conversation was devoted to interstellar propulsion concepts, with a few even more speculative issues thrown in. In particular, Kardashev's three levels of civilization. A brief refresher: Nikolai Kardashev was a Russian astronomer who sought to classify extraterrestrial civilizations based on energy output. A Type I civilization would be capable...
Tracking Research into Deep Space Exploration Alpha Centauri and other nearby stars seem impossible destinations not just for manned missions but even for robotic probes like Cassini or Galileo. Nonetheless, serious work on propulsion, communications, long-life electronics and spacecraft autonomy continues at NASA, ESA and many other venues, some in academia, some in private industry. The goal of reaching the stars is a distant one and the work remains low-key, but fascinating ideas continue to emerge. This site will track current research. I'll also throw in the occasional musing about the literary and cultural implications of interstellar flight. Ultimately, the challenge may be as much philosophical as technological: to reassert the value of the long haul in a time of jittery short-term thinking. Above: Alpha and Beta Centauri are sometimes known as 'The Pointers,' since they lead the eye to the Southern Cross. This stunning image, taken in June of 2001, is the work of Italian...
