We use strategies to weigh the issues around us and maximize our chances for success. Can we create a strategy not just for a specific short-term goal but for the survival and growth of our entire species? In the essay that follows, Michael Michaud looks at the elements of such a vision, one that by necessity takes us out of our own biosphere and into the cosmos. As long-time Centauri Dreams readers know, Michaud is well suited to discussing the resolution of conflict and the attainment of goals. His lengthy career in the U.S. Foreign Service led to posts as Counselor for Science, Technology and Environment at U.S. embassies in Paris and Tokyo, and Director of the State Department's Office of Advanced Technology. He has also been chairman of working groups at the International Academy of Astronautics on SETI issues, and is the author of the highly regarded Contact with Alien Civilizations: Our Hopes and Fears about Encountering Extraterrestrials (Springer, 2007). By Michael A.G....

Some mission concepts for interstellar flight demand equipment that can stay functional not just for decades but for centuries. Do we know how to build such things? Missions like Voyager are encouraging in that we have two spacecraft that were never built for the kind of longevity we've demanded of them, and we're still tracking their signals. But as Robert Forward once speculated, the problem may not be just in building the spacecraft, but in how we handle them. Forward's issue involved the changes on Earth that might occur over a long-duration spaceflight like the one he envisioned in Rocheworld (1984, first published as Flight of the Dragonfly). A crewed starship is actually on the way to Barnard's Star, dependent on the massive laser installations in the Solar System whose beam will allow it to decelerate (through 'staging' the sail) into the destination star system. But there is a movement afoot on Earth to shut down the beam, motivated by money, politics and the usual cast of...

Heath Rezabek is concerned with information -- how we uncover it, how we use it, how we store it against cataclysmic events. A librarian and futurist, Heath uses science fiction to explore how Vessels of preserved knowledge might be developed and maintained not only on Earth but in the far reaches of our Solar System and beyond. In today's work, he traces resource discovery and archival technologies back as far as Vannevar Bush and forward into a future that has transformed our early experiments into endlessly morphing realms of human growth and preservation. by Heath Rezabek This is the fourth installment in a continuing series of speculative fiction here on Centauri Dreams. Feedback from prior installments helps shape the themes and direction of subsequent entries, but the purpose and focus of these pieces is to explore a timeline (or timelines) in which comprehensive, resilient archives of Earth's biological, scientific, and cultural record — deep archives for deep time...

Reducing the size of a starship makes eminent sense, and as we saw yesterday, Alan Mole has been suggesting in the pages of JBIS that we do just that. A 1 kilogram interstellar probe sounds like it could be nothing more than a flyby mission, and with scant resources for reporting back to Earth at that. But by Mole's calculation, a tiny probe can take advantage of numerous advances in any number of relevant technologies to make itself viable upon arrival. Just how far can nanotech and the biological sciences take us in creating such a probe? For what Mole proposes isn't just an automated mission that uses nano-scale 'assemblers' to create a research outpost on some distant world. He's talking instead about an actual human colony, one whose supporting environment is first guaranteed by nanobots and, in turn, the robots they build, and whose population is delivered through the hatching of human embryos or perhaps even more exotic methods, such as building humans from DNA formulae stored...

Whenever we're audacious enough to categorize far future civilizations, we turn to the work of Nikolai Kardashev. Nick Nielsen today looks at the well known Kardashev scale in the light of a curious fact: While many use Kardashev's rankings in their own speculations, few have gone back and dug into his original paper. In Kardashev's terms, our planet is close to attaining Type I status, which would surprise many commentators. And doesn't the ambiguity over what constitutes the energy of a star -- red dwarf? red giant? -- play havoc with cut and dried 'type' definitions? How subsequent writers have adapted and modified the Kardashev scale makes for a cautionary tale about mastering our sources before using them for further extrapolation. For that matter, are there better gauges of a civilization than its use of particular energy resources? Answering the question deepens the debate that Kardashev so fruitfully began. by J. N. Nielsen The name of Nikolai S. Kardashev is synonymous with...

Last week I looked at three figures who put solar sails on the map in the 1950s -- Carl Wiley, who wrote the concept up in Astounding, Ted Cotter, who analyzed it for colleagues at Los Alamos, and Richard Garwin, who brought solar sailing into the academic journals. It was not long after Garwin's work that science fiction pounced on solar sails through a cluster of memorable stories beginning with Cordwainer Smith (Paul Linebarger) and "The Lady Who Sailed the Soul." More about that story and its era soon, including work by Poul Anderson, Jack Vance, and perhaps the best known of all from that era, Arthur C. Clarke's "Sunjammer." But today let's go way back to what is I think the first story that ever dealt with raw light as a propulsive mechanism. Georges Le Faure and Henri de Graffigny published Aventures extraordinaires d'un savant russe (The Extraordinary Adventures of a Russian Scientist) in three volumes beginning in 1889, with a fourth volume coming out under the promising...

I discovered Karl Schroeder's work when I was researching brown dwarfs some years ago. Who knew that somebody was writing novels about civilizations around these dim objects? Permanence (Tor, 2003) was a real eye-opener, as were the deep-space cultures it described. Schroeder hooked me again with his latest book -- he's dealing with a preoccupation of mine, a human presence in the deep space regions between ourselves and the nearest stars, where resources are abundant and dark worlds move far from any sun. How to maintain such a society and allow it to grow into something like an empire? Karl explains the mechanism below. Science fiction fans, of which there are many on Centauri Dreams, will know Karl as the author of many other novels, including Ventus (2000), Lady of Mazes (2005) and Sun of Suns (2006). by Karl Schroeder My newest science fiction novel, Lockstep, has just finished its serialization in Analog magazine, and Tor Books will have it on the bookshelves March 24....

Heath Rezabek, an Austin, TX-based librarian, futurist and long-term thinker, continues the chronicle of his evolving work on the Vessel project and its ramifications. Developed as a strategy for preserving our cultural and biological heritage, Vessel is inevitably a way to re-examine ourselves in new and startling ways. Science fiction offers a supple way to visualize what generations in the near and far future may draw from such archives, leading perhaps to created intelligences that grow by sampling our imagery, our artifacts, our mythologies. In the passage that follows, we meet an SF writer named Thea Ramer, and learn more about Dr. Kaasura, whose early work with Vessel points to synthetic minds, re-woven patterns of quantum reality and the development of Saudade-class starships. But let Heath explain... by Heath Rezabek This is the third installment in a continuing series of speculative fiction here on Centauri Dreams. Feedback from prior installments helps shape the themes and...

Growing up in the Sputnik era, I followed the fortunes of space exploration with huge enthusiasm. In those days, the model was primarily planetary in nature, the progression from the Moon to the nearest planets and then beyond seemingly inevitable. At the same time, a second model was developing around the idea of space stations and self-contained worlds built by man, one that would reach high visibility in the works of Gerard O'Neill, but one that ultimately reached back as far as the 1920's (Oberth and Noordung) and further back to the science fiction of Jules Verne. In fact, E. E. Hale's "The Brick Moon" explored a space station as early as 1869. But even as our Mariners and Veneras explored other planets, an interstellar thread was also emerging. Robert Goddard wrote about interstellar journeys in 1918, science fiction was full of such travel as the field matured in the 1940s and '50s, and serious scientific study of interstellar flight became established by mid-century. Writing...

I've had pulsars on the mind the last couple of days after our discussion of PSR 1257+12 and its contribution to exoplanetology. A bit more about pulsars today and the way we look at extreme objects through science fiction. PSR 1257+12 was discovered in 1990 by Aleksander Wolszczan using data from the Arecibo dish, and it was in 1992 that Wolszczan and Dale Frail published a paper outlining their discovery of the first planets ever found outside our Solar System. The two planets were joined by a third in 1994, but evidence for a fourth was later shown to be mistaken. In any case, the three planets confounded many astronomers, who hardly expected the first extrasolar planets to be found orbiting a radiation-spewing neutron star. Centauri Dreams regular Al Jackson was co-author of a 1992 study of PSR1257+12 that examined orbital resonance in the planets around the pulsar. In a note last night, Al mused "Just think of a K2 civilization setting up a research station on one of those to...

If human civilization is to extend itself beyond our planet, it will need to take with it the plants, animals and microorganisms that can sustain a living ecosystem. Nick Nielsen argues in this compelling essay that preserving our own species into the remote future thus means preserving terrestrial biology as well, drawing sustenance from it and maintaining it long enough for Earthly systems -- and ourselves -- to evolve in the myriad environments that await us among the stars. Mr. Nielsen's examination of future speciation continues his ongoing series on existential risk and the nature of human expansion. You can keep up with his thinking on his two blogs: Grand Strategy: The View from Oregon and Grand Strategy Annex, or follow him on Twitter, where he is @geopolicraticus. by J. N. Nielsen Some time ago on Twitter I wrote, "Astrobiology is island biogeography writ large." As in the classic science fiction film This Island Earth, we know our world to be an island oasis of life in the...

Building a starship takes us along an evolutionary path as we master the myriad methods of its creation. And the process does not start at some arbitrary point in the future. Rather, it begins now as we put today's technologies to work in the service of new concepts. Living 'meta-technologies' offer a way into the enclosed but verdant spaces of a worldship. In the essay below, Centauri Dreams regular Rachel Armstrong looks at current projects that explore the kind of biospheres a worldship will entail, and discusses enriched ecosystems that form 'a new kind of Nature.' Dr. Armstrong is co-director of AVATAR (Advanced Virtual and Technological Architectural Research) in Architecture & Synthetic Biology at the University of Greenwich, London. She completed clinical training at the John Radcliffe Medical School at Oxford in 1991, and in 2009 began PhD work in chemistry and architecture at University College London. by Rachel Armstrong "Why are you crying grandma?" "I'm not!" The old...

Librarian and futurist Heath Rezabek has become a familiar figure on Centauri Dreams through his writings on existential risk and how our species might counter it through Vessels, installations conveying our planet's biological and cultural identity. The Vessel concept is far-reaching, and if we build it on Earth, we would likely take it to the stars. But in what form, and with what purpose? Enter the lightsail starship mission Saudade 4, its crew -- some of whom are humans by choice -- nourished on the dreams of a continually growing archive. Heath's chosen medium, the essay form morphing into fiction, conjures the journey star travelers may one day experience. by Heath Rezabek I've described The Vessel Project in four prior posts: August 29, 2013 - Deep Time: The Nature of Existential Risk October 3, 2013 - Visualizing Vessel November 7, 2013 - Towards a Vessel Pattern Language December 13, 2013 - Vessel: A Science Fiction Prototype As I began preparing my paper on the Vessel...

by J. N. Nielsen Nick Nielsen thinks big. In fact, today's essay, which ranges over vast stretches of time and space and places human civilization in a continually expanding context, reminds me of nothing so much as the Olaf Stapledon of Starmaker. As with Stapledon, the questions are deeply philosophical: If we find a way to travel arbitrarily close to the speed of light, thus creating a civilization Carl Sagan once envisioned -- one spread not only over space but over aeons -- how will we cohere as a species? And what forms will our migrations take after the first pioneers have left our niche in the cosmos behind? For more of Nielsen's work, see his blogs Grand Strategy: The View from Oregon and Grand Strategy Annex. In my previous Centauri Dreams post, Cosmic Loneliness and Interstellar Travel, I argued that our cosmic loneliness is the reason we seek peer species and peer civilizations in the universe, that interstellar travel is a more practicable way to explore the universe for...

Futurist and librarian Heath Rezabek returns with further thoughts on preserving mankind's heritage through Vessels that would contain everything we are as a species. But in an unusual offering, he goes on to provide a fictional look at how such Vessels affect the future. Just how do we preserve and present Earth's cultural and biological heritage against events we cannot predict? And if we succeed, what shape will our Vessels take, and who will find them? Join Heath as he ventures into 'science fiction prototyping' as a way of influencing outcomes. by Heath Rezabek I've described The Vessel Project in three prior posts: August 29, 2013 - Deep Time: The Nature of Existential Risk October 3, 2013 - Visualizing Vessel November 7, 2013 - Towards a Vessel Pattern Language Each month I'll try to do a new A/B sorting survey on the topic of very long term preservation. Past Poll: "Which positioning / placement of a Vessel archive or haven would take priority?" is continually open for...

When I first read about Project Daedalus all those many years ago, I remember the image of a probe passing through a planetary system, in this case the one assumed to be around Barnard's Star, at high velocity, taking measurements all the way through its brief encounter. And wouldn't it be a fabulous outcome if something rare happened, like the reception of some kind of radio activity or some other sign of intelligent life on one of the planets there? That thought stayed with me when, much later, I read Greg Matloff and Eugene Mallove's The Starflight Handbook and began thinking seriously about interstellar flight. The chance of making such a detection would be all but non-existent if we just chose a destination at random, but by the time we get to actual interstellar spacecraft, we'll also have an excellent idea -- through space- and Earth-based instruments -- about what we might find there. These days that ETI detection, while always interesting, isn't at the top of my list of...

Nick Nielsen's latest invokes the thinking of Carl Sagan, who explored the possibilities of interstellar ramjets traveling at close to the speed of light in the 1960's. What would the consequences be for the civilization that developed such technologies, and how would such starships affect their thinking about communicating with other intelligent species? Sagan's speculations took humans not just to the galactic core but to M31, journeys made possible within a human lifetime by time dilation. Nielsen, an author and contributing analyst with strategic consulting firm Wikistrat, ponders how capabilities like that would change our views of culture and identity. Fast forward to the stars, after all, means you can't go home again. by Nick Nielsen In my previous Centauri Dreams post, I discussed some of the possible explanations of what Paul Davies has called the "eerie silence" - the fact that we hear no signs of alien civilizations when we listen for them - in connection with existential...

Yesterday I mentioned that we don't know yet where New Horizons will ultimately end up on a map of the night sky like the ones used in a recent IEEE Spectrum article to illustrate the journeys of the Voyagers and Pioneers. We'll know more once future encounters with Kuiper Belt objects are taken into account. But the thought of New Horizons reminds me that Jon Lomberg will be talking about the New Horizons Message Initiative, as well as the Galaxy Garden he has created in Hawaii, today at the Arthur C. Clarke Center at UC San Diego. The talk will be streamed live at: http://calit2.net/webcasting/jwplayer/index.php, with the webcast slated to begin at approximately 2045 EST, or 0145 UTC. While both the Voyagers and the Pioneers carried artifacts representing humanity, New Horizons may have its message uploaded to the spacecraft's memory, its collected images and perhaps sounds 'crowdsourced' from people around the world after the spacecraft's encounter with Pluto/Charon. That, at...

Although John Jacob Astor IV did many things in his life -- as a businessman, builder, Spanish American War veteran and financier -- his place in history was secured with his death on the Titanic in 1912. His was actually one of the three hundred or so bodies that were later recovered out of over 1500 who died, and he is buried in Trinity Church Cemetery in New York City. Less well known is the fact that Astor was a writer who, in 1894, produced a science fiction novel called A Journey to Other Worlds in which people travel to the outer planets. I've been digging around in this curious novel and discovered an interstellar reference that was entirely new to me. Using a form of repulsive energy called 'apergy,' variants of which were much in vogue in the scientific romances of this era (think H. G. Wells' The First Men in the Moon, which uses gravity-negating 'cavorite'), Astor's crew sets out on the Callisto to explore Jupiter and Saturn, where various adventures ensue. Along the way,...

Among the numerous groups now emerging with an eye toward space exploration, SpaceGAMBIT has been the one I knew the least about. It was a pleasure, then, to hear from Alex Cureton-Griffiths, who is UK Project Lead for SpaceGAMBIT. Alex was more than happy to offer this description of SpaceGAMBIT and its plans for the future. He tells me he spends his time traveling and talking to people about our future in space and how they can get involved. In his spare time he "hunts for good coffee and hacks on steam-powered satellite thrusters for fun." Alex, I buy coffee green and roast my own beans. If you're a coffee guy, we need to talk, man. by Alex Cureton-Griffiths When I mention to people that I'm trying to help build humanity into a spacefaring species, I usually get the same reaction: " I don't believe it - that's so cool!" I'm with them all the way on the second part of that reaction - it really is amazingly cool. It's the first part that gets me - the "I don't believe it" part. For...