I had intended to use today's post to talk about yesterday's sessions here in Aosta, but it's going on midnight here, and tomorrow will clearly not afford any opportunities to write. Tuesday turns out to be our sightseeing day. We leave the hotel at 9:00 and head for Verrès, where we visit the Mechatronics Laboratory of the Politecnico di Torino. Then we head up into the mountains, visiting the Bard fortress, with individual visits to the Museum of the Alps. After lunch at what is said to be an excellent restaurant called La Polveriera, we go to an exhibition called 'Verso l'alto, l'ascesa come esperienza del sacro' -- Towards the heights: The ascent as experience of the sacred. Then to dinner at the Hotel Notre Maison, where we are promised traditional Aosta Valley food. Image: The Aosta town hall, where our opening sessions were held. Later, we moved to the Hotel Europe. As for tomorrow, we don't get back to the hotel until midnight. No more today or I'll be late for the bus, but...

What I'll surely remember the most about arriving in Italy is the sight of snow on the Alps as the plane descended out of a cloudy morning sky into Milan. But right after that comes the two hang gliders that soared past an alpine peak as the van that was taking me to Aosta moved north toward the town, the landscape becoming a series of valleys cutting through the steep clefts. The second of the two hang gliders looked for all the world as if it were going to land right on the highway, a daunting thought given how the traffic was moving, but as we rounded a turn I saw that it had caught an updraft and was angling out and away. What a view the pilot must have had. Image: The view from my room at the Hotel Europe in Aosta. It was hot and humid when I took this, but cooled off dramatically during the night. If the air conditioner worked, all would be perfect. Below is a photo from the street in front of the hotel. As you can tell, this is the place to be for a guy who loves mountains the...

Night Flight to Italy I'm off tomorrow night to Italy, specifically to the Sixth IAA Symposium on Realistic Near-Term Advanced Scientific Space Missions. I'll be delivering a talk at the conference and a public lecture in the town of Aosta and, assuming a robust Internet connection, I'll also be sending along news of the conference as it unfolds. I'm looking forward particularly to catching up with Giancarlo Genta, Greg Matloff and wife C Bangs, and Claudio Maccone, and it will be great to touch base again with Les Johnson, whom I haven't seen since we talked at Marshall Space Flight Center in 2003. Superluminal Radio Waves and their Uses An article in the Santa Fe New Mexican discusses the work of John Singleton, a physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, who has created a 'polarization synchrotron,' which according to the report pushes radio waves faster than the speed of light. In a paper on this work, Singleton explains that: ...though no superluminal source of...

Is the movement toward ever more sophisticated technology irreversible? If you've studied history, the answer is obviously no. Various speculations arise from this -- Carl Sagan once opined that without the intervening collapse known as the Dark Ages, we might have seen a Greek civilization exploring near-Earth space a thousand years ago. It's also likely that no law prevents another collapse into technological and scientific somnolence, perhaps sparked by war, or disease, or economic catastrophe. This is why I always hedge my bets when asked about timetables for space exploration. How long until we get humans to the outer system? How long until we launch a fast starship? Everyone is in a hurry, but so much depends on whether we keep growing our technology. Nanotechnology, for example, could change everything, but it's one thing to be using molecular assemblers by the end of the century, and quite another to see the fruition of this work stalled for a millennium by external events....

The eruption of Mt. Tambora in Indonesia in 1815 pumped so much sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere that New England farmers found their fields frosted over in July. Climate change, it seems, can be quick and overwhelming, at least on short scales. The eruption of the Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991 cooled global temperatures for several years by about half a degree Celsius. Sulfur dioxide works. So how about this: We send a fleet of airships high into the stratosphere, attached to hoses on the ground that pump 10 kilos of sulfur dioxide every second. The airships then spew this mix into the upper atmosphere, a aerosolized pollutant that, turning the skies Blade Runner red, shields the planet from the Sun's heat. Call it geo-engineering, an extreme form of human climate manipulation that is the subject of a recent story in The Atlantic. Into the Anthropocene Writer Graeme Wood notes that our activities have been transforming the planet for centuries now, leading some to dub...

Life Beneath the Ice Three kilometers down in the Greenland ice sheet is what I call an extreme environment. Even so, Penn State researchers have been able to bring a bacterium called Herminiimonas glaciei back to life after a dormancy of 120,000 years in these conditions. The work involved incubating the samples at 2 degrees Celsius for seven months, then at 5 degrees Celsius for a further four and a half, a patient process rewarded by the appearance of the purple-brown bacteria. Ten to fifty times smaller than E. coli, Herminiimonas glaciei evidently used its size to survive in liquid veins amongst the ice crystals. Jennifer Loveland-Curtze describes the find: "These extremely cold environments are the best analogues of possible extraterrestrial habitats. The exceptionally low temperatures can preserve cells and nucleic acids for even millions of years. H. glaciei is one of just a handful of officially described ultra-small species and the only one so far from the Greenland ice...

The bet between Tibor Pacher and myself continues to draw emails, proving that my friend Tibor was right when he saw an interstellar wager as a teaching opportunity. I still maintain that an interstellar mission will not be launched anywhere near as early as 2025, but Tibor does have his advocates, as you can see on the Long Bets site. Moreover, it's been useful to plug in distances and velocities for a 2000-year mission to a place like Proxima Centauri when I speak to audiences about how large the distance between the stars really is. 2000 years is a long time, but we're still talking 650 kilometers per second, and just 20 years to the Oort Cloud! And as a guy who used to build model airplanes back in my youth, first in plastic and then from balsa wood (wonderful memories of working with kits of World War I and II aircraft from Guillow), I can relate to Tibor's latest venture. MiniSpaceWorld is an attempt to create, at a European site still to be determined, a wide-ranging exhibit...

by Jon Lomberg I had no idea when the week started that I would be publishing not one but two essays on Star Trek. But Jon Lomberg was inspired by Athena Andreadis' take on the new movie to write down his own reflections on the series in its many forms. Lomberg's name should be instantly recognizable to this readership. Jon was Carl Sagan's principal artistic collaborator for many years, illustrating Sagan's books and serving as chief artist for COSMOS. He storyboarded many of CONTACT's astronomical animations and designed the cover for the Voyager Interstellar Record, which is now pushing into the heliosheath and bound for true interstellar space. In addition to regular lecturing, Jon is the creator of the remarkable Galaxy Garden in Kona, Hawaii and remains an active astronomical artist in many media. Herewith his thoughts and recollections of Star Trek, Sagan, Roddenberry and more. I wasn't a fan of the series when it first came out. The first episode I recall seeing was in the...

by Athena Andreadis This morning I have the pleasure of introducing my friend Athena Andreadis, who will give us her thoughts on the recent Star Trek film. Dr. Andreadis is Associate Professor of Cell Biology at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, and the author of To Seek Out New Life: The Biology of Star Trek. In her basic molecular neurobiology research, she studies the fundamental gene regulatory mechanism known as alternative splicing. The long-term goal of her research is to understand how the brain works, and contribute to the struggle against mental retardation and dementia. When not conjuring in the lab, Athena writes essays on science and science fiction, while writing her own SF/F fiction, some of which appears at the site Starship Reckless, which she founded. We Now Interrupt Our Regular Programming… … so that, stepping into Paul's hospitable parlor, I can hold forth on the Star Trek reboot (henceforth ST||, for parallel timeline). I assume that...

The appearance of the new Star Trek film has inspired Athena Andreadis to revisit the epilogue of her 1998 book To Seek Out New Life: The Biology of Star Trek (Random House). Andreadis (University of Massachusetts) is a frequent commenter on issues of space exploration on this and other sites, including her own Astrogator's Logs, where you'll find the updated epilogue. It's well worth reading in the context of how and why we explore. Sharply critical of the Star Trek franchise, Andreadis nonetheless commends its celebration of the human thirst for knowledge, something she believes may be the one thing we have in common with whatever extraterrestrial beings we find out there. This is bracing stuff, even for those of us who leaned more toward Heinlein than Star Trek in our youths. Here, the author speaks about dreaming of possibilities and making them accessible: Scientific understanding does not strip away the mystery and grandeur of the universe; the intricate patterns only become...

The 100th edition of the Carnival of Space is now up at the One-Minute Astronomer site, where I learned of the existence of Christopher Crockett's Innumerable Worlds blog. Christopher's story on two gas giants around subgiant stars is well worth reading. He's a UCLA graduate student now working at Lowell Observatory who offers a good deal of background material in his posts, as in this comment on the new planets' unusually eccentric orbits: How planets end up on such crazy orbits is a matter that is currently being researched. These two worlds aren't alone; many of the new worlds we're finding sit on highly eccentric orbits. The leading hypothesis is that interactions between closely spaced planets might affect their orbits. If two planets get too close, the lighter one can get ejected from the planetary system entirely while the remaining, more massive, world is left behind on a very elliptical orbit. This is the same principle we use to slingshot probes out into deep space by...

Postponements of major science projects are generally dismaying, but sometimes they become so grand they attain a kind of immortality. The latest multi-billion dollar delay boggles the mind: "Delays of this magnitude were once the stuff of science fiction," Scolese told reporters during a noon press conference Monday that actually started around 3:15 p.m. "But now, thanks to a number of long-overdue technological advances, this historic delay will stretch the very limits of what humankind can push back indefinitely." You won't want to miss The Onion's take as NASA Embarks On Epic Delay.

Seth Shostak's recent op-ed in the New York Times offers an unsettling title: 'Boldly Going Nowhere.' And Seth, an astronomer at the SETI Institute, gets right to his point: "...we're not about to breach the final frontier. Piling into a starship and barreling into deep space may long remain — like perfect children or effort-free bathroom cleaners — a pipe dream." The homely similes reinforce the theme, one that also surfaces in Shostak's new book Confessions of an Alien Hunter (National Geographic, 2009), which makes a strong case for continuing SETI as our digital capabilities expand. Indeed, given the daunting challenge of interstellar distances, it could be argued that our sole contact with extraterrestrial civilizations, if they exist, will take place through communications from afar, mediated by radio or light. Let's face it, the numbers are tough. The fact is that we can already do interstellar travel, provided we're content with transit times of many tens of...

1951's The Man from Planet X is a creepy Edgar G. Ulmer film involving an inscrutable alien whose small craft falls to earth in the moors of Scotland. There he is attacked, exploited and ends up being killed in spite of the fact that his real mission was apparently peaceable. The film is noir-like, the sets foggy and surreal, and although the dialog positively creaks, the moody atmosphere still puts a chill up my spine. I mention this personal favorite because my copy of The Man from Planet X has a glitch, a defect in the aging tape that causes the image to jitter for a ten second period just as actress Margaret Field is getting progressively spooked by the strange alien craft. You would think that an upgrade to DVD is in order, and indeed, that's my only real choice. But the other night, watching a DVD of Alec Guinness in the delightful Our Man in Havana (1959), I saw the image lock up and freeze, decomposing into pixels that reconfigured themselves only after a couple of minutes...

Tau Zero practitioner Kelvin Long has organized an interstellar session at the forthcoming 2009 UK Space Conference, which will take place from April 1 to 4 at Charterhouse School, near Godalming Surrey. The overall conference looks to be an excellent one, with symposia on rocket technology, panels and presentations on astronomy and space science, much educational material for teachers and students, and the presentation of the Arthur Clarke Awards on the evening of the 4th. From our perspective, of course, it's good to see the Tau Zero logo up on the site's interstellar page, with links to all presentations. Long is a scientist in the plasma physics industry who will address inertial confinement fusion and antimatter-catalyzed fusion for space propulsion. You'll recall that inertial confinement was the propulsion system of choice for the Project Daedalus starship design created by members of the British Interplanetary Society. Antimatter-catalyzed fusion interests me in light of...

I love the London Underground and have a great fondness for wandering about the city with a tube map stuck in my pocket. My wife and I last did this a few years back, making an early March trip in which we rented a Bloomsbury apartment for ten days and hopped all over the area, station to station, emerging for blustery walks to various historical sites (we were both, at one time, medievalists), then ducking into nearby restaurants for tea and warming up, talking about what we had seen and examining the map for our next stop. A map of the London Underground is a schematic diagram that has a beauty of its own, reducing a city beyond its topography to a sequence of formalized connections and zones. The fascination is in the abstraction of the familiar, rendering distance and space intelligible. Now look at what we might call a 'tube map' of the Milky Way, as produced by Samuel Arbesman, a postdoc at Harvard with an interest in computational sociology and, obviously, big maps. Click on...

A nice, tidy liftoff for Kepler, and like all night launches, well worth watching. The mission is generating a satisfying amount of attention in the press and a slew of news releases, from one of which which I'll quote Geoff Marcy: "In part, learning about other Earths -- the frequency of them, the environment on them, the stability of the environment on other Earths, their habitability over the eons -- is going to teach us about our own Earth, how fragile and special it might be. We learn a little bit about home, ironically, by studying the stars." And of course it's hard to argue with that, although the focus for most of us will only be tangentially here and most emphatically there -- just how many terrestrial worlds are out there, and how likely are the chances for their being in the habitable zone? Marcy gets preferential treatment here simply because, along with Paul Butler and a team of exoplanet hunters spread out over the globe, he has been involved in almost half of our...

Prioritizing the Outer System Europa or Titan? Jupiter or Saturn? NASA and the European Space Agency, faced with the dilemma of choosing between competing missions, apparently settled on both, with the Europa Jupiter System Mission likely to be implemented first. Here we're talking about two robotic orbiters, launched on separate spacecraft in 2020, with arrival in Jupiter space in 2026. The two orbiters will orbit Europa and Ganymede respectively, while the later Titan Saturn System Mission would include a NASA orbiter and an ESA lander and research balloon. Both missions thus move forward for further study. I note all this in the context of what will surely be ever increasing interest in Europa following the publication of Richard Greenberg's Unmasking Europa: The Search for Life on Jupiter's Ocean Moon. I'll be talking to Greenberg tomorrow and reporting on our conversation soon, but I do want to quote him on a particular point right away, relevant as it is to mission planning:...

The 91st Carnival of Space offers up Brian Wang's look at Project Orion, with links to photos and videos relating to nuclear pulse propulsion, one of which I embed here from the This is Rocket Science site. For those who like to take potentially workable ideas up to gigantic scales, Brian discusses the Super-Orion, all eight million tons of it, with the capacity to take three million tons of cargo anywhere in the Solar System. The pusher plate would have reached a diameter of 400 meters. Brian notes the scale: 400 meters in diameter means that the area (footprint) is about 30 football fields. 4 football fields long by 8 football fields wide. The height of the super-orion is about the height of skyscraper like Taipei 101 or Petronas Towers. The base of the Great Pyramid forms a nearly perfect square with about 230 m (756 feet) on a side. When newly completed, the Great Pyramid rose 146.7 m (481.4 ft)—nearly 50 stories high. Super-Orion would have had the volume of about 10 Great...