"The timescales for technological advance are but an instant compared to the timescales of the Darwinian natural selection that led to humanity's emergence -- and (more relevantly) they are less than a millionth of the vast expanses of cosmic time lying ahead." -- Martin Rees, On the Future: Prospects for Humanity (2018). by Henry Cordova This bulletin is meant to alert mobile units operating in or near Sector 2921 of a potential danger, namely intelligently directed, deliberately hostile, activity that has been detected there. The reports from the area have been incomplete and contradictory, fragmentary and garbled. This notice is not meant to fully describe this danger, its origins or possible countermeasures, but to alert units transiting near the area to exercise caution and to report on any unusual activity encountered. As more information is developed, a response to this threat will be devised. It is speculated that the nature of this hazard may be due to unusual manifestations...

It seems a good time to re-examine the venerable Kardashev scale marking how technological civilizations develop. After all, I drop Nikolai Kardashev's name into articles on a regular basis, and we routinely discuss whether a SETI detection might be of a particular Kardashev type. The Russian astronomer first proposed the scale in 1964 at the storied Byurakan conference on radio astronomy, and it has been discussed and extended as a way of gauging the energy use of technological cultures ever since. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Jonathan Jiang, working with an international team of collaborators, spurs this article through a new paper that analyzes when our culture could reach Kardashev Type I, so let's remind ourselves of just what Type I means. Kardashev wanted to consider how a civilization consumes energy, and defined Type I as being at the planetary level, with a power consumption of 1016 watts. This approximates a civilization using all the energy available from its home...

Early exoplanet detections always startled my friends outside the astronomical community. Anxious for a planet something like the Earth, they found themselves looking at a 'hot Jupiter' like 51 Pegasi b, which at the time seemed like little more than a weird curiosity. A Jupiter-like planet hugging a star? More hot Jupiters followed, which led to the need to explain how exoplanet detection worked with radial velocity methods, and why big planets close to their star should turn up early in the hunt. Earlier, there were the pulsar planets, as found by Aleksander Wolszczan and Dale Frail around the pulsar PSR B1 257+12 in the constellation Virgo. These were interestingly small, but obviously accumulating a sleet of radiation from their primary. Detected a year later, PSR B1620-26 b was found to orbit a white dwarf/pulsar binary system. But these odd detections some 30 years ago actually made the case for the age of exoplanet discovery that was about to open, a truly golden era of deep...

Just a quick note for today as I finish up tomorrow's long post. But I did want you to be aware of this new title, Extraterrestrial Intelligence: Academic and Societal Implications, which has connections with recent topics and will again tomorrow, when we discuss a new paper from Jason Wright and SETI colleagues on technosignatures. As with the recent biography of John von Neumann, I haven't had the chance to read this yet, but it's certainly going on the list. The book is out of Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Here's the publisher's description: What are the implications for human society, and for our institutions of higher learning, of the discovery of a sophisticated extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) operating on and around Earth? This book explores this timely question from a multidisciplinary perspective. It considers scientific, philosophical, theological, and interdisciplinary ways of thinking about the question, and it represents all viewpoints on how likely it is that an...

We can’t know whether there is a probe from another civilization – a von Neumann probe of the sort we discussed in the previous post – in our own Solar System unless we look for it. Even then, though, we have no guarantee that such a probe can be found. The Solar System is a vast place, and even if we home in on the more obvious targets, such as the Moon, and near-Earth objects in stable orbits, a well hidden artifact a billion or so years old, likely designed not to draw attention to itself, is a tricky catch. As with any discussion of extraterrestrial civilizations, we’re left to ponder the possibilities and the likelihoods, acknowledging how little we know about whether life itself is widely found. One question opens up another. Abiogenesis may be spectacularly rare, or it may be commonplace. What we eventually find in the ice moons of the outer system should offer us some clues, but widespread life doesn’t itself translate into intelligent, tool-making life. But for today, let’s...

I'm riffing on a Brian Aldiss title this morning, the reference being the author's 1959 collection Galaxies Like Grians of Sand, which is a sequence of short stories spanning millions of years of Earth's future (originally published as The Canopy of Time). But sand is appropriate for the exercise before us today, one suggested by memories of the day my youngest son told me he had to construct a model of an atom and we went hunting all over town for styrofoam balls. It turns out atoms are easy. Suppose your child comes home with a project involving the creation of a scale model of the galaxy. Pondering the matter, you announce that grains of salt can stand in for stars. Sand might work as well, but salt is easier because you can buy boxes of salt at the grocery. So while your child goes outside to do other things, you and your calculator get caught up in the question of modeling the Milky Way. Just how much salt will you need? Most models of the galaxy these days come in at a higher...

Anyone who ever had the pleasure of talking to Freeman Dyson knows that he was a gracious man deeply committed to helping others. My own all too few exchanges with him were on the phone or via email, but he always gave of his time no matter how busy his schedule. In the article below, Colin Warn offers an example, one I asked him for permission to publish so as to preserve these Dysonian nuggets for a wider audience. Colin is an Associate Propulsion Component Engineer at Maxar, with a Bachelor of Science in mechanical engineering from Washington State University. His research interests dip into in everything from electric spacecraft propulsion to small satellite development, machine learning and machine vision applications for microrobotics. Thus far in his young career, he has published two papers on the topics of nuclear gas core rockets and interstellar braking mechanisms in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society. He tells me that when he's not working on interstellar...

Reminiscing about some of Robert Forward's mind-boggling concepts, as I did in my last post, reminds me that it was both Forward as well as the Daedalus project that convinced many people to look deeper into the prospect of interstellar flight. Not that there weren't predecessors - Les Shepherd comes immediately to mind (see The Worldship of 1953) - but Forward was able to advance a key point: Interstellar flight is possible within known physics. He argued that the problem was one of engineering. Daedalus made the same point. When the British Interplanetary Society came up with a starship design that grew out of freelance scientists and engineers working on their own dime in a friendly pub, the notion was not to actually build a starship that would bankrupt an entire planet for a simple flyby mission. Rather, it was to demonstrate that even with technologies that could be extrapolated in the 1970s, there were ways to reach the stars within the realm of known physics. Starflight was...

The end of one year and the beginning of the next seems like a good time to back out to the big picture. The really big picture, where cosmology interacts with metaphysics. Thus today's discussion of evolution and development in a cosmic context. John Smart wrote me after the recent death of Russian astronomer Alexander Zaitsev, having been with Sasha at the 2010 conference I discussed in my remembrance of Zaitsev. We also turned out to connect through the work of Clément Vidal, whose book The Beginning and the End tackles meaning from the cosmological perspective (see The Zen of SETI). As you'll see, Smart and Vidal now work together on concepts described below, one of whose startling implications is that a tendency toward ethics and empathy may be a natural outgrowth of networked intelligence. Is our future invariably post-biological, and does such an outcome enhance or preclude journeys to the stars? John Smart is a global futurist, and a scholar of foresight process,...

Topping the list of priorities for the Decadal Survey on Astronomy and Astrophysics 2020 (Astro2020), just released by the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, is the search for extraterrestrial life. Entitled Pathways to Discovery in Astronomy and Astrophysics for the 2020s, the report can be downloaded as a free PDF here. At 614 pages, this is not light reading, but it does represent an overview in which to place continuing work on exoplanet discovery and characterization. In the language of the report: "Life on Earth may be the result of a common process, or it may require such an unusual set of circumstances that we are the only living beings within our part of the galaxy, or even in the universe. Either answer is profound. The coming decades will set humanity down a path to determine whether we are alone." A ~6 meter diameter space telescope capable of spotting exoplanets 10 billion times fainter than their host stars, thought to be feasible by the 2040s,...

Back in 2013, Heath Rezabek began developing a series in these pages on a proposal he called Vessel, which he had first presented at the 100 Year Starship Symposium in September of 2012. A librarian and futurist, Rezabek saw the concept as a strategy to preserve both humanity's cultural as well as biological heritage, with strong echoes of Greg Benford's Library of Life, which proposed freezing species in threatened environments to save them. In Heath's case, a productive partnership with frequent Centauri Dreams contributor Nick Nielsen led to articles by both, which produced a series of interesting discussions in the comments. I noticed in Philip Lubin's new paper, discussed here on Friday, an explicit reference to the idea of interstellar craft as possible backup devices for living systems. Lubin singled out the Svalbard Global Seed Vault (styled by some the 'Doomsday Vault'), which preserves seed samples numbering in the millions, with the aim of keeping them safe for centuries....

What do we mean by an 'interstellar mission'? The question came up in relation to Interstellar Probe, that 'Voyager Plus' concept being investigated by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. I do indeed see it as an interstellar mission, as Interstellar Probe takes us outside the heliosphere and into the local interstellar medium. We need to understand conditions there because it would be folly to mount a mission to another star without knowing the dynamics of the heliosphere's movement through the interstellar cloud we are currently in, or the ramifications of moving between it and the adjacent cloud as we make our crossing. How could it be otherwise? Journeys need maps and knowledge of conditions along the way. Thus we push into the fringes of interstellar space, and gradually extend our reach. As we do this, we inevitably produce changes in the way we perceive our place in the cosmos. Cultural expectations about space have been shaped by what I might call a 'planar'...

Two missions with interstellar implications have occupied us in recent days. The first, Interstellar Probe, has significance in being the first dedicated mission into the local interstellar medium. Here the science return would be immense, as we would have the opportunity to view the heliosphere from the outside. Culturally, Interstellar Probe is the kind of mission that can force resets in how we view exploration, a thought I want to expand on in the next post. The other mission -- multiple mission options, actually -- involves interstellar objects like the odd 1I/'Oumuamua and 2I/Borisov, the latter clearly a comet, the former still hard to categorize. In fact, between the two, what I think we can just call Comet Borisov seems almost pedestrian, with a composition so like comets in our own system as to suggest such objects are commonplace among the stars. Whereas to explain 'Oumuamua as a comet, we have to stretch our definitions into bizarre objects of pure hydrogen (a theory that...

How does SETI fit into the long-term objectives of a civilization? To a society whose central project is communication, the 'success' of the project in detecting intelligence around another star is obviously not assured, but if it does find a signal, would it eventually receive an Encyclopedia Galactica? There is much to ponder here, and Nick Nielsen today tackles the question from the standpoint of not one but many Encylopedia Galacticas, spread out through cosmological time as opposed to the 'snapshot' version a finite species sees. Read on to consider the kinds of civilizations that might practice or be discovered by SETI and how they might formulate their listening and communications strategy. SETI is analyzed here as one of a variety of central projects Nielsen has examined in these pages and elsewhere. For more of his work, consult Grand Strategy: The View from Oregon, and Grand Strategy Annex. by J. N. Nielsen 1. Variations on the Theme of Spacefaring Civilization 2. A Missed...

Writing about Karel ?apek, as Milan ?irkovi? did in our last entry, spurs me to note that the BBC has an interesting piece out on ?apek called The 100-year-old fiction that predicted today. It’s a fine essay delivered by Dorian Lynskey on both ?apek and the Russian writer Yevgeny Zamyatin, whose influential novel We shared a birth year of 1921 with ?apek’s R.U.R. If ?apek gave us robots, it could be said that Zamyatin gave us the modern dystopia. “If you have had any experience with science fiction,” writes Lynskey, “you will probably have imbibed some trace elements of RUR and We.” I will defer on Zamyatin, for I suspect that Dr. ?irkovi? has thoughts about him that will appear in a future essay here. However, looking toward the origins of ideas has me thinking about another literary figure, the American writer and critic Edgar Allan Poe. Always known for his tales of the macabre, Poe (1809-1848) more or less invented the detective story, but he was also influential in the origins...

If biological life gives way to its own creations, should we adjust our SETI outlook to include entire civilizations composed of artificial intelligences? A postbiological culture was certainly on the mind of the Czech writer Karel ?apek (1890-1938), whose work is the subject of today's essay by Milan ?irkovi?. It's a good time to reassess this author as we careen toward what may or may not be a 'singularity,' when digital intelligence eclipses our own. As ?irkovi? explains, ?apek was an utterly indefatigable writer whose work is less well known in the west than it should be given its significance not only to science fiction but the study of the future. Dr. ?irkovi? is a research professor at the Astronomical Observatory of Belgrade, the author of numerous research and professional papers as well as three research monographs and four books, the most recent of which is The Great Silence: The Science and Philosophy of Fermi’s Paradox (Oxford University Press). Read on to learn about...

Milan M. ?irkovi?'s work has been frequently discussed on Centauri Dreams, as a glance in the archives will show. My own fascination with SETI and the implications of what has been called 'the Fermi question' led me early on to his papers, which explore the theoretical, cultural and philosophical space in which SETI proceeds. And there are few books in which I have put more annotations than his 2018 title The Great Silence: The Science and Philosophy of Fermi’s Paradox (Oxford University Press). Today Dr. ?irkovi? celebrates Stanislaw Lem, an author I first discovered way back in grad school and continue to admire today. A research professor at the Astronomical Observatory of Belgrade, (Serbia), ?irkovi? obtained his PhD at the Dept. of Physics, State University of New York in Stony Brook in 2000 with a thesis in astrophysical cosmology. He tells me his primary research interests are in the fields of astrobiology (habitable zones, habitability of galaxies, SETI studies), philosophy...

I'll have something more to say about this later, but I did want to mention that the email subscribers to Centauri Dreams should now begin seeing the regular postings in their inbox via the services of follow.it. I wanted to go ahead and mention this as several people wrote to verify that this was indeed my doing. The answer is yes, the follow.it messages are not a fishing expedition for malefactors, but the new delivery mechanism. Again, this applies to those who subscribe to the site by email. More about all this in about a week once we have things normalized.

Robert H. Gray, author of The Elusive Wow: Searching for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, has searched for radio signals from other worlds using the Very Large Array and other radio telescopes. You'll find numerous links to his work in the archives here. In today's essay, Gray takes a look at a classic benchmark for assessing the energy use of civilizations, introducing his own take on Earth's position in the hierarchy and how these calculations affect the ongoing SETI effort. His article on the extended Kardashev scale appeared in The Astronomical Journal https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-3881/ab792b. Photograph by Sharon Hoogstraten. by Robert H. Gray Human civilization has come an amazingly long way in a short time. Not long ago, our major source of energy was muscle power, often doing hard work, while today much more energy is available from fuels, fission, hydro, solar, and other sources without breaking a sweat. How far can civilization go? It's probably impossible...

Let's take a brief break from research results and observational approaches to consider the broader context of how we do space science. In particular, what can we do to cut across barriers between different disciplines as well as widely differing venues? Working on a highly directed commercial product is a different process than doing academic research within the confines of a publicly supported research lab. And then there is the question of how to incorporate ever more vigorous citizen science. SpaceML is an online toolbox that tackles these issues with a specific intention of improving the artificial intelligence that drives modern projects, with the aim of boosting interdisciplinary work. The project's website speaks of "building the Machine Learning (ML) infrastructure needed to streamline and super-charge the intelligent applications, automation and robotics needed to explore deep space and better manage our planetary spaceship." I'm interested in the model developing here,...