Summer in Green Town, Illinois back in 1928 opened like this: "It was a quiet morning, the town covered over with darkness and at ease in bed. Summer gathered in the weather, the wind had the proper touch, the breathing of the world was long and warm and slow. You had only to rise, lean from your window, and know that this indeed was the first real time of freedom and living, this was the first morning of summer." Thus the beginning of Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine, which I re-read not long after the author's death. With catastrophic fires in the American west and triple-digit heat along the Atlantic seaboard, summer has indeed come, and so has a brief summer holiday for Centauri Dreams. Although I won't have months ahead of me the way Bradbury's character Douglas Spaulding did, I am looking forward to a week off. This site is now approaching its eighth anniversary and I'm ready for a break, one that will give me time to catch up on reading, do necessary work around the house, and...

We all carry our assumptions with us no matter where we go, dubious extra baggage that can confuse not just our scientific views but our lives in general. That's why it's so refreshing when those assumptions are challenged in an insightful way. Think, for example, of the starship as envisioned by Hollywood. In our times it looks like something produced by the joint efforts of NASA, ESA and other governmental space agencies. No matter how diverse the crew, the model is always based on western culture, the assumptions reflecting our modern ethos. When an assumption is ripe for questioning, along comes a writer like Michael Bishop. Consider the starship Kalachakra, carrying a crew of 990 to a planet in the Gliese 581 system, as envisioned in Bishop's 'Twenty Lights to the Land of Snow,' a novella in the Johnson/McDevitt book Going Interstellar. Most of the crew spends the flight in hibernation using the wonderfully named drug ursidormizine -- thus slumbering 'bear-like' -- but each...

Tau Zero founder Marc Millis is interviewed by Bruce Dorminey in Forbes this week, the logical first question being where interstellar flight ranks on our list of priorities. A case can be made, after all, that we have yet to get humans beyond the Moon, and that while we have managed robotic missions to the outer planets, our technologies need development closer to home. Should a Moon base get our attention, or a Mars mission? Millis argues that pursuing next steps like these should be managed in tandem with the pursuit of more far-reaching advances that force us to look beyond existing methods. Breakthroughs can change everything, and Millis is, after all, the former head of NASA's Breakthrough Propulsion Physics project, which came to an abrupt end in 2002 when a congressional earmark to build a propulsion laboratory in Alabama -- one that cost more than all NASA's BPP research put together -- scarfed up what could have been research money. And as Millis tells Dorminey, we're left...

Thinking of Ray Bradbury, as I suppose most of us were yesterday after learning of his death, I found my reminiscences of his work mixing with what was to have been today's topic, solar sails and their beamed sail counterparts. I've read almost all of Bradbury's work up through the 1960s and admittedly little after that, but he's a writer I return to often to try to recapture the early magic. I was going through his stories trying to think of one involving solar sails and I came up blank, but in a moment of pure serendipity, I realized that a book I mentioned yesterday held a little Bradbury gem that was all about sails and their implications for the human imagination. The book is Arthur C. Clarke's collection Project Solar Sail (Roc, 1990), which contains a poem Bradbury wrote with Jonathan V. Post called "To Sail Beyond the Sun: A Luminous Collage." Like so much of Bradbury's work, it uses language like witchcraft to pull you into the experience, and like so much of the later...

Today was to have been devoted to antimatter, continuing the discussion not only of how to produce the stuff on Earth or harvest it in nearby space, but how to create the kind of propulsion system that could tap its enormous energies. But the Dorothy Jemison Foundation for Excellence released its first public announcement about the 100 Year Starship yesterday, and I want to go right to that story given the interest that grew out of last year's starship symposium in Orlando. I'll get back to antimatter, then, and particularly the provocative work of Ronan Keane and Wei-Ming Zhang on magnetic nozzles for propulsion systems, on Monday. For today, though, let's talk about pushing out into the galaxy. The Tau Zero Foundation has a particular interest in the 100 Year Starship organization because our friends at Icarus Interstellar, who are re-thinking the 1970s Project Daedalus design, were partners in the winning proposal, which was called "An Inclusive, Audacious Journey Transforms Life...

I've been thinking all weekend about Dandridge Cole, the aerospace engineer and futurist whose death at age 44 deprived interstellar studies of one of its most insightful advocates. Cole died in 1965, just five years before a deadline he himself set (in 1953!) for a manned landing on the Moon. But then, the former paratrooper from Ohio thought a lot about the future and the need for a kind of 'future studies' that would look at current technological trends and project going forward just as conventional historical studies reconstruct what happened to us in centuries past. The heart attack that struck Cole down in his office at General Electric's Space Technology Center in Valley Forge, PA deprived us of much, but we do have the substantial legacy of a number of articles and monographs, along with three books, among which Islands in Space: The Challenge of the Planetoids, written with Donald Cox (Chilton Books, 1964) may stand out as the most influential. Andreas Hein, who is heading...

Our expectations determine so much of what we see, which is one of the great lessons of Michael Michaud's sweeping study of our attitudes toward extraterrestrial intelligence in Contact with Alien Civilizations (Springer, 2006). But extraterrestrials aside, I've also been musing over how our attitudes affect our perceptions in relation to something closer to home, the human space program. Recently I was reminded of Richard Gott's views on the space program and the Copernican Principle, which suggest that just as our location in the universe is not likely to be special, neither is our location in time. My expectation, for example, is that whether it takes one or many centuries, we will eventually have expanded far enough into the Solar System to make the technological transition to interstellar missions. But Gott (Princeton University) has been arguing since 2007 that there is simply no assurance of continued growth. In fact, his work indicates we are as likely to be experiencing the...

By Michael Michaud The following post is a distinct change of pace for Centauri Dreams, a work of fiction that gets at questions at the heart of SETI. We've considered many ideas about interstellar probes that humans may one day launch toward nearby stars. But the reverse could occur: A more advanced technological civilization could send a probe in our direction, particularly after detecting signs of life or technology on a rapidly developing Earth. This idea is a challenge to the dominant scientific paradigm of contact -- our detection of radio signals from a remote society. The short story below presents one of many possible scenarios. In this case, the probe is an intelligent machine. It lacks the omniscience so often assumed in films and television programs; this form of intelligence, like ours, can misunderstand evidence and is capable of making mistakes. This story avoids the two stereotyped film and television versions of contact: being saved by altruistic aliens, or being...

You'll want to bookmark the 100 Year Starship Initiative's new site, which just came online. From the mission statement: 100 Year Starship will pursue national and global initiatives, and galvanize public and private leadership and grassroots support, to assure that human travel beyond our solar system and to another star can be a reality within the next century. 100 Year Starship will unreservedly dedicate itself to identifying and pushing the radical leaps in knowledge and technology needed to achieve interstellar flight while pioneering and transforming breakthrough applications to enhance the quality of life on earth. We will actively include the broadest swath of people in understanding, shaping, and implementing our mission. And check here for news about the 2012 public symposium, which will be held in Houston from September 13-16. Quoting from that page: This year, 2012, DARPA gave its stamp of approval to and seed funded —100 Year Starship (100YSS)—a private...

by A. A. Jackson Although it was probably science fiction that got Al Jackson into interstellar flight, he remembers discovering the work of Eugen Sänger back around 1960 and becoming energized to seek out the few scientific papers on relativistic rocket designs that were then available. With a firm background in engineering, he turned to physics in 1975, receiving a PhD from the University of Texas at Austin, a natural move for a man who had worked for NASA during the heyday of Apollo as astronaut trainer on the Lunar Module Simulator. Going through Al’s papers is a fascinating exercise in its own right, but I was reminded because of our recent articles on Robert Bussard’s ramjet ideas that Al had worked with Daniel Whitmire. Bussard spoke about fusing protons in his ramscoop engine, but subsequent analysis showed that the power needed to compress protons to fusion densities far outweighed the power that would be produced. It was Daniel Whitmire who developed the ‘catalytic ramjet’...

It's fascinating to watch how expansive ideas take hold in the public imagination. The idea of a starship that could scoop up particles from the interstellar medium came to Robert Bussard while he was at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory and, as we saw recently in our articles on slowing down a starship, became the basis for subsequent magsail concepts because Bussard's design evidently generates far more drag than effective thrust. But before the problems of the design became widely known, Walter Sullivan, a writer for the New York Times, had brought the ramjet into play for future human journeys to the stars in a book called We Are Not Alone (definitely not the same book as the 2011 title by Dirk Schulze-Makuch). Subtitled 'The Continuing Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence' in its latest revision, the original 1964 book was written at a time when SETI was an infant discipline (although the later revision goes through the Drake equation and places SETI in the context of...

I once thought about putting together a collection of classic papers on interstellar flight. It would start with early work by the likes of Les Shephard, Eugen Sänger and Carl Wiley (whose groundbreaking paper on solar sails appeared not in a scientific journal but in Astounding Science Fiction). The book would proceed with the key papers of Forward, Bussard and Dyson and move into papers from the Project Daedalus report, then to Matloff and Mallove and up to the present day, with a long look at the Italian solar sail work of Vulpetti, Maccone and Genta. Especially later in this period there is abundant material to choose from, and there's Alcubierre to consider, and Millis' work with the Breakthrough Propulsion Physics project. And then there's Geoff Landis and Robert Frisbee and the closely reasoned sociological analyses of Michael Michaud and... Well, you can see what happens when you start pondering editing possibilities. The book is already growing to enormous size and I've done...

It's shaping up to be an interesting week. I want to get to the recent Kepler data release, and also to the antimatter news from CERN, and I also want to talk about everything from decelerating an interstellar craft to models of expansion into the galaxy a la Frank Tipler. [And thanks to Centauri Dreams reader Eric Goldstein for reminding me of the upcoming WISE data release on the 14th!]. For today, though, let's look at two upcoming conferences, especially since I'm running behind in getting to the first of them, the CONTACT 2012 gathering, which is coming up right away. The full title of this one is CONTACT: Cultures of the Imagination, and it's a meeting with a rich history. Back in 1979, Jim Funaro was teaching a course in anthropology at Cabrillo College (Aptos, CA) that used science fiction as a vector into the scientific issues his course raised. The course allowed students to go to work creating cultures and, in a game-like simulation, to explore how the fictional societies...

Physicist Al Jackson, who is the world's greatest dinner companion, holds that title because amongst his scientific accomplishments, he is also a fountainhead of information about science fiction. No matter which writer you bring up, he knows something you never heard of that illuminates that writer's work. So it was no surprise that when the subject of self-replicating probes came up in these pages, Al would take note in the comments of Philip K. Dick's story "Autofac," which ran in the November, 1955 issue of H. L. Gold's Galaxy. A copy of that issue sits, I am happy to say, not six feet away from me on my shelves. This is actually the first time I ever anticipated Al -- like him, I had noticed "Autofac" as one of the earliest science fiction treatments of the ideas of self-replication and nanotechnology, and had written about it in my Centauri Dreams book back in 2004. If any readers know of earlier SF stories on the topic, please let me know in the comments. In the story, the two...

by Claudio Maccone Physicist Les Shepherd, whose funeral is today, left friends throughout the astronautical community. Claudio Maccone, who worked with Shepherd on many occasions, was quick to offer his recollections of this remarkable man whose standards of excellence and unflagging support helped many young scientists as they embarked on careers in space science. A young guy (44 years old, i.e. "young" by IAA standards) joins the IAA Interstellar Space Exploration Committee (ISEC) headed by Les Shepherd and Giovanni Vulpetti: that happened at the World Space Congress in Washington, D.C., USA, also known as the 43rd IAC, August 28 - September 5, 1992). I was then working at Alenia Spazio SpA in Torino (Turin), Italy, and I had this secret love for future interstellar space missions ("secret" since at my space company nobody was interested, of course). So, I consulted with my good old friend and "teacher" (he is senior than I) Giovanni Vulpetti, who was in a similar position at...

There are so many things to say about Les Shepherd, who died on Saturday, February 18, that I scarcely know where to begin. Born in 1918, Leslie Robert Shepherd was a key player in the creation of the International Astronautical Federation (IAF), becoming its third president in 1957 -- this was at the 8th Congress in Barcelona just a week after the launch of Sputnik -- and in 1962 he would be called upon to serve as its president for a second time. A specialist in nuclear fission who became deeply involved in nuclear reactor technology, Shepherd was one of the founding members of the International Academy of Astronautics (IAA), and served as chairman of the Interstellar Space Exploration Committee, which met for the first time at the 1984 IAF Congress in Lausanne, Switzerland. The IAF Congress in Stockholm the following year was the scene of the first ISEC symposium on interstellar flight, one whose papers were subsequently collected in one of the famous 'red cover' issues of the...

The Italian contribution to the interstellar effort has been substantial, and I'm pleased to know three of its principal practitioners: Claudio Maccone, Giancarlo Genta, and Giovanni Vulpetti. It was with great pleasure, then, that I took Roberto Flaibani up on his offer of appearing in his excellent blog Il Tredicesimo Cavaliere (The Thirteenth Knight). Roberto had translated several Centauri Dreams articles into Italian in the previous year and was now looking for comments on the ramifications of human contact with extraterrestrials as we push into interstellar space. This article on Star Trek's Prime Directive grew out of our talks and became part of a broader discussion of related articles on Roberto's site. I thank him for continuing to translate my work into Italian, and now offer the original essay to Centauri Dreams readers. I should probably throw in a qualifier -- I've always enjoyed Star Trek but am hardly a rabid fan, getting most of my science fiction not from film or TV...

Gregory Benford's work is so widely known that it almost seems absurd to introduce him, but for any Centauri Dreams readers who have somehow missed it, I challenge you to read In the Ocean of Night and not become obsessed with reading this author's entire output. This week has been a science fictional time for Centauri Dreams, with discussion of SF precedents to modern discoveries in the comments for stories like Marc Millis' 'Future History.' So it seems appropriate to end the week with an essay Greg published yesterday on his own site, one that appealed to me so much that I immediately asked him for permission to run it again here. In the essay, Greg takes a look at science fiction writer Thomas Disch and in particular the way his thoughts on SF illuminate not just the genre but the world we live in. It's insightful stuff, and makes me reflect on how our ideas of the future shape our upcoming realities. I will also admit to a fascination with science fiction's history that never...

These are good times for Icarus Interstellar, which teamed with the Dorothy Jemison Foundation and the Foundation for Enterprise Development to win the 100 Year Starship proposal grant. Mae Jemison, the first female African-American astronaut to fly into space, founded DJF in honor of her late mother. As lead on the proposal, her organization now takes on the challenge of building a program that can last 100 years, and might one day result in a starship. Centauri Dreams congratulates the winning trio, and especially Kelvin Long, Richard Obousy and Andreas Tziolas, whose labors in reworking the Project Daedalus design at Icarus Interstellar have paid off. While the award was announced to the winners at the end of last week, I held up the news here while the three parties involved coordinated their own announcement. But I see that other venues are picking up the story, as in this Sharon Weinberger piece for the BBC and now a similar article in Popular Science, so it seems time to go...

Predictions about the future of technology are so often wide of the mark, yet for many of us they're irresistible. They fuel our passion for science fiction and the expansive philosophy of thinkers like Olaf Stapledon. To begin 2012, Tau Zero founder Marc Millis offers up a set of musings about where we may be going, a scenario that, given the alternatives, sounds about as upbeat as we're likely to get. by Marc Millis "If we have learned one thing from the history of invention and discovery, it is that, in the long run - and often in the short one - the most daring prophecies seem laughably conservative." ~ Arthur C. Clarke In the 'new year' spirit of looking ahead, I offer now my personal views of 'a' possible future. These predictions are based first on trend extrapolations, include intersections from other disciplines, and work in the wildcard possibility of breakthrough propulsion physics. Consider this a science fictional offering intended to provoke thought rather than a...