Ever wonder what it would have been like to sit in on a great occasion? I used to think about this in relation to a dinner party the painter Benjamin Haydon threw in 1817 at his London studio. At the 'immortal dinner' were, among others, William Wordsworth, John Keats and Charles Lamb, leading literary figures of their day. Fortunately, gatherings like these aren't relegated to the 19th Century. In a piece that ran originally in The New York Review of Science Fiction, Gregory Benford describes an equally extraordinary evening with some of the greatest minds of our time: Martin Rees, Stephen Hawking, and Paul Dirac. A physicist and award-winning science fiction writer, Benford relates the particulars of a Cambridge sabbatical as scientists at the top of their form meet for an evening of bonhomie, whimsy and reflection. by Gregory Benford In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the...

Are we alone in the universe? Nick Nielsen muses on the nature of the question, for the answer seems to depend on what we mean by being 'alone.' Does a twin of Earth's ecosystem though without intelligent life suffice, or do we need a true peer civilization? For that matter, are we less alone if peer civilizations are widely spaced in time and space, so that we are unlikely ever to encounter evidence of them? And what of non-peer civilizations? SETI proceeds while we ponder these matters, a search that Nick sees as a priority because of the disproportionate value of an exterrestrial signal. Like Darwin in the Galapagos, we push on, collecting data in a quest that is without end. It's a prospect Nick finds invigorating, and so do I. by J. N. Nielsen One of the great questions of our time is, "Are we alone?" Even though it is, for us, an existential question that touches upon our cosmic loneliness, it is, at the same time, a scientific question, as befits our industrial-technological...

I had hoped that the anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing would stir up some memories for Centauri Dreams regular Al Jackson, and I was not to be disappointed. Here, spurred partly by weekend news reports questioning who said the first words from the Moon, Al thinks back to a time of Champagne and jubilation, and gives us an inside look at those famous first words. He was also kind enough to pass along some of his own photos. A widely known figure in the interstellar community, Al was astronaut trainer on the Lunar Module Simulator and worked closely with, among many others, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. He is also a man who never forgets a single thing he has ever read, as I learn every time I talk to him about science fiction, which I hope to do again this fall in Houston. by A. A. Jackson The 45th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing was on a Sunday, just as it was on July 20 1969. My wife (of one year) and I lived in the Dijon Apartments in Clear Lake City, Houston. So for most...

As we approach the 45th anniversary of the first landing on the Moon, journalist and author Neil McAleer has been looking back at an interview he conducted with Neil Armstrong on March 16, 1989. The author of Visionary: The Odyssey of Sir Arthur C. Clarke (Clarke Project, 2012), McAleer has lived among and written about the space community for many years. We learn little about Clarke from this interview, but Armstrong's character comes through -- he's terse, focused, always impatient to get back to work. I suspect Centauri Dreams regular Al Jackson, who worked with Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin in his role as astronaut trainer on the Lunar Module Simulator (see The Magicians of Confidence), will recognize Armstrong's mode here immediately. His self-imposed distance could never conceal the cool competence he displayed on the most breathtaking descent in history. An interview conducted by Neil McAleer I requested this interview with Neil Armstrong 25 years ago, when I was writing and...

Michael Michaud gave the speech that follows in 1988 at the 39th International Astronautical Congress, which met in Bangalore, India in October of that year. Reading through it recently, I was struck by how timely its theme of spaceflight advocacy and human expansion into the cosmos remains today. When he wrote this, Michaud was director of the Office of Advanced Technology for the US Department of State, though he reminded his audience that the views herein were his own and not necessarily those of the US government. Michaud's support of spaceflight and his determinedly long-term approach to our possibilities as a species has distinguished his space writing, which has been prolific and includes the essential Contact with Alien Civilizations (Copernicus, 2006). Although I had thought of updating some of the references below, it seems unnecessary. What counts are the themes. Working well before the recent surge in interstellar interest, Michael here explains why humans need to develop...

The great Ukrainian mathematician Israil Moiseyevich Gelfand was famous for his weekly seminars in Moscow, where sudden switches in topics and impromptu presentations were the norm. Although his listeners had heard it many times, Gelfand liked to tell this story: In the early 20th Century, a man approaches a physicist at a party and says he can't understand how the new wireless telegraphy works. How is it possible to send a signal without using wires? The physicist tells him it is simple. "To understand wireless telegraphy, you must first understand how the wired telegraph system works. Imagine a dog with its head in London and its tail in Paris. You yank the tail in Paris and the head in London barks. That is wired telegraphy. Wireless telegraphy is the same thing except without the dog." It always got Gelfand a laugh, but he liked to use the story for a deeper purpose. According to Edward Frenkel, who in his youth attended and presented at some of Gelfand's seminars, Gelfand would...

Because his new novel Shipstar had just reached the top of my reading stack, and because I had been writing about Shkadov Thrusters last week, I asked Gregory Benford if he could provide a deeper explanation of how these enormous structures might work. Greg had already noted in an email to me that a Shkadov Thruster is inherently unstable, and earlier discussions of the idea on Centauri Dreams had raised doubts about the acceleration possible from such a device. However, I’ve referred to what Benford and Larry Niven have created as a ‘modified’ Shkadov Thruster, and I was anxious to hear their thinking on what might be possible. Greg, an award-winning science fiction author and physicist, here offers his insights into -- and reservations about -- a propulsion scheme capable of moving stars. by Gregory Benford Physicist Leonid Shkadov first described in 1987 a stellar propulsion system made by putting an enormous mirror in a static, fixed position near a star. To stay there it had to...

I've always loved the idea of an O'Neill space habitat because of the possibility of engineering a huge environment to specification. That notion translates well to worldship ideas -- a multi-generational journey would certainly be easier to take in an environment that mimicked, say, a Polynesian island, than aboard something more akin to a giant metal barracks. But best of all is to take your environment with you, which is why the thought of moving entire stars and planets to another location has such appeal when we're talking on an intergalactic scale. Adam Crowl reminded us of the possibilities on Monday: In theory a tight white-dwarf/planet pair can be flung out of the Galactic Core at ~0.05c, which would mean a 2 billion year journey across every 100 million light-years. A white-dwarf habitable zone is good for 8 billion years or so, enough to cross ~400 million light-years. It'd be a 'starship' in truth on the Grandest Scale. Back in November of 1973, Stanley...

Andreas Hein, who has appeared in these pages before on the subject of worldships, here speculates about a much different kind of traveling: The uploading of consciousness. Andreas is Deputy Director of the Initiative for Interstellar Studies (I4IS), as well as Director of its Technical Research Committee. He founded and leads Icarus Interstellar's Project Hyperion: A design study on manned interstellar flight. Andreas received his master's degree in aerospace engineering from the Technical University of Munich and is now working on a PhD there in the area of space systems engineering, having conducted part of his research at MIT. He spent a semester abroad at the Institut Superieur de l'Aeronautique et de l'Espace in Toulouse, working on the numerical simulation of the hypervelocity impact of space dust on spacecraft antennas, and also worked at the European Space Agency Strategy and Architecture Office on stakeholder analysis for future manned space exploration. Today's essay is...

Les Shepherd's 1952 paper "Interstellar Flight" appears in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society," a fitting place given Shepherd's active involvement in the organization. He would, in fact, serve the BIS as its chairman, first succeeding Arthur C. Clarke in that role in 1954, and returning in 1957 and again in 1965 for later terms of office. "Interstellar Flight" is one of those papers that turns people in new directions after they have read it, and we can see the gradual acceptance of travel between the stars as a possibility that does not violate the laws of physics beginning in its pages. Much less heralded but more widely seen was an adapted version of "Interstellar Flight" that appeared in Science Fiction Plus in April of 1953. The magazine was a revival of Hugo Gernsback's career as a science fiction publisher that ran for seven issues before its demise in December of the same year. Gernsback's name was revered in science fiction circles as the founder of Amazing...

I didn't have the chance to meet Mark Lupisella at the first 100 Year Starship symposium in Orlando, but the publication of Cosmos & Culture: Cultural Evolution in a Cosmic Context in 2013 made me wish I had sought him out. Co-edited with Steven J. Dick (about whom there are so many interesting things to say that I'll have to carry over into a future post with them), Cosmos & Culture offers essays from scientists, historians and anthropologists about the evolution of culture both on Earth and, most likely, beyond it. These are, of course, issues we've been considering recently in the work of Cameron Smith and Kathleen Toerpe, and in a broader sense they inform many of the SETI and astrobiology discussions we have here. Then Clément Vidal, who is an author and a post-doctoral researcher at the Free University of Brussels, passed along the paper I missed in Orlando, Lupisella's "Cosmocultural Evolution: Cosmic Motivations for Interstellar Travel." To be fair to myself, we all...

Can we overcome our preconceptions about extraterrestrial life? Kathleen Toerpe thinks the answer is yes, for we're moving from the era of ill-informed jokes about 'little green men' to a widening appreciation of our place in the cosmos. Dr. Toerpe is the Deputy CEO for Programs and Special Projects at the Astrosociology Research Institute and editor of The Journal of Astrosociology. She also serves as a NASA/JPL Solar System Ambassador, one whose educational efforts on behalf of space exploration have revealed that the younger generation is familiar with and inspired by the subject, a fact that gives this essay its welcome patina of optimism. The recent hearings on SETI in the U.S. House of Representatives show that, for some at least, old attitudes die hard, but ongoing research into astrobiology and SETI is likely to make the 'giggle factor' seem positively prehistoric within our lifetimes. by Kathleen D. Toerpe, PhD Flip through any newsfeed these days, and it seems that humanity...

In our email conversations leading up to my publishing Human Universals and Cultural Evolution on Interstellar Voyages, Cameron Smith confirmed that there were few anthropologists engaged in studying long-term spaceflight. The same can be said for historians and sociologists, although we do have some prominent names devoting themselves to changing that. Kathleen Toerpe is doing splendid work with the Astrosociology Research Institute (I'm hoping for a new report from her soon in these pages), while Interstellar Migration and the Human Experience (1985) made a determinedly multidisciplinary effort to study our place in the cosmos. The latter book was actually the proceedings of the Conference on Interstellar Migration held in Los Alamos in 1983, and it remains a storehouse of insights into spaceflight's effect on humanity. Presenters at the 100 Year Starship symposia have thus far been multidisciplinary as well, with representation from biologists, philosophers, writers and...

Cameron Smith last joined us just over a year ago with an essay on human interstellar migration in the context of biological evolution. Here he turns to issues of culture and change over time. An anthropologist and prehistorian at Portland State University in Oregon, Dr. Smith brings insights he has gained in the study of the early human experience on Earth to the manifold problems confronting us as we head for the stars. His current work on interstellar issues is part of his engagement with Project Hyperion, an attempt by Icarus Interstellar to develop parameters and reference studies for a multi-generational worldship. Be aware of Dr. Smith's excellent recent volume Emigrating Beyond Earth: Human Adaptation and Space Colonization (Springer-Praxis, 2013), and ponder the synergies that occur between the study of past human migrations and the ongoing cultural and biological evolution of a species aspiring to leave the world that gave it birth. by Cameron M. Smith, PhD 1. Biological...

Nick Nielsen's new essay follows up his speculations on interstellar infrastructure with a look at the kind of starships we might one day build. The consequences are profound. What if we master interstellar technologies without needing the Solar System-wide infrastructure many of us assume will precede them? A civilization's interstellar 'footprint' would be radically altered if this is the case, and evidence of mega-engineering among the stars sharply constrained. Then too, how we view what is possible could be transformed by breakthroughs in biology and longevity, all part of the mix as we look at what Nick calls 'undetermined nodes in future history." by J. N. Nielsen In my previous Centauri Dreams post, The Infrastructure Problem, I sought to make a distinction between fundamentally different forms that a spacefaring civilization might take, one tending toward primarily planetary-based infrastructure, and another tending toward primarily space-based infrastructure. I am always...

Today begins Heath Rezabek's survey as we look at the curation of a booklist on interstellar flight, using as basis a list of books I've gradually accumulated over the years. Before Heath introduces the survey, a few words about my methods: Many of the books listed below are ones that I used in preparing my 2005 book Centauri Dreams: Imagining and Planning Interstellar Exploration. But in the time since, I've added a number of more recent titles. I'm hoping this curation project will reveal other books that may be useful as we flesh out the list. Please glance over the entire list and be thinking of additional possibilities as you engage with Heath's survey. As to the choices made, these are non-fiction science books, although several recent titles contain a mix of non-fiction and science fiction stories. Feel free to suggest SF titles that specifically broaden our thinking about interstellar flight -- we can either integrate them into the main list or develop a second list focused...

As a librarian with a futuristic bent, Heath Rezabek has developed the Vessel Project as a way of studying how we can preserve our knowledge and culture against future risk. That work -- and Heath's ongoing engagement with the Long Now Foundation -- asks what we might put into a long-term archive housing the essence of our community. Finding the answers involves 'community curation,' asking varying interest groups to develop and discuss their choices. We're going to run such a survey with the Centauri Dreams readership, helping to firm up a shortlist of books on interstellar topics that I've been wanting to return to for some time. That list will appear tomorrow, but today Heath explains strategies for building archives to represent communities like the one that clusters here around interstellar flight. by Heath Rezabek In my first Centauri Dreams installment, I noted that I had recently begun an Internship with the Long Now foundation, assisting and advising in their initial...

We last heard from Karl Schroeder in his essay Creative Constraints and Starflight, published here back in March. Schroeder was describing his new novel Lockstep, whose ingenious plot is in the service of a daring idea: If we are limited to speeds well less than that of light, can we still find a way to achieve the kind of deep space civilization we've seen depicted in so much science fiction? That would include travel to far places within single human lifetimes, trade with colony worlds, and much of the panoply of what is sometimes called 'space opera.' Schroeder's solution is ingenious and challenges the preconceptions most of us bring to interstellar flight, which is why I want to return to Lockstep this morning. I had read a pre-publication copy late in 2013 and found that it triggered some incipient thoughts on how we relate to time that I needed to work out. In particular, not only in Karl's work but in Neal Stephenson's and, to an extent, in Alastair Reynolds', I've found a...

2014 isn't nearly as top-heavy with interstellar conferences as the year before, but we do have two to discuss this morning, both of them slated for fall in North America. Looking through the preliminary information, I'm remembering how many good sessions grew out of last year's meetings. For a field that grew up fueled largely by the enthusiasm of individuals who met in person only rarely, we suddenly found ourselves with the 100 Year Starship conference in Houston, Icarus Interstellar's Starship Congress in Dallas, two Starship Century events (one in London, one in San Diego), the Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop (version 2) and a London conference on what Bob Parkinson so wonderfully calls 'the philosophy of the starship.' Various smaller get-togethers occurred as well, and so, of course, did huge space-dominated conferences like the International Astronautical Congress and other aeronautics, astronautics and SETI sessions around the world. But who would have thought even...

How we conceive of distant worlds is important. After all, we want to be scientifically accurate even as we deal with subjects that fire the public imagination. Thinking about planets in the habitable zones of other suns invariably makes us think of 'Earth 2.0' and the prospect of green and blue planets filled with life. But each situation will be different, which is part of the great fascination of this quest. Billions and billions of worlds, each of them sui generis. Science fiction has offered us glimpses of many worlds tantalizingly like the Earth but in some major respect different. Here, for example, is a prose description of a planet circling the star 82 Eridani, as envisioned by Stephen Baxter in his 2011 novel Ark. We are looking at it from the starship that has taken a band of colonists/refugees from a drowning Earth to what could be their new home: A big strip of land stretching north to south across the equator was "the Belt," a kind of elderly Norway with deep-cut fjords...