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...

by Tibor Pacher My friend Tibor Pacher is joined with me (until 2025, anyway) in our 'interstellar bet,' under the auspices of the Long Now Foundation. Trained as a physicist at the Eötvös University in Budapest and the University of Heidelberg, Dr. Pacher has been exploring ways to get across interstellar concepts to the public through venues like his peregrinus interstellar. Social networking is to some of us a new frontier, and I've asked Tibor to provide some background on what he is doing to make sure that an obscure wager develops an audience and becomes an effective teaching tool. Yesterday I watched the movie In the Shadow of the Moon. I must admit, this was not the first time, but I wanted to capture more details and - well, it is just a great film, and, I believe, not only for space heads a 'must.' Sober and emotional at the same time, for me it is a perfect example of how the public imagination can be captured about space, in a way which shows the deeply human nature of...

With the Kepler mission scheduled for launch this spring, we should see increasing attention in the media on the detection of terrestrial-class exoplanets and speculations on possible life upon them. But it's easy to forget that Kepler has other important goals, taking estimates, for example, on the disposition of planets in multiple star systems, and studying the stars that have planets in orbit around them. Kepler will also be looking at planetary distribution, including 'hot Jupiters,' and examining their size, density and reflectivity. A Deep Space Challenge for Bloggers All of which is a tall order for a three and a half-year mission, but we can expect a successful run to result in an extended mission as Kepler keeps its gaze fixed on a region in space allowing it to monitor the brightness of more than 100,000 stars. Have a look at OrbitalHub's treatment of Kepler in the current Carnival of Space, where DJ runs through the mission parameters and examines the equipment. Looking...

What do you get out of science fiction? We'd all answer that question differently, I suppose, and surely the breadth of concepts and startling ideas is at the top of the list. But for me, the real beauty of the form is landscapes. I sometimes find myself reading a paragraph and then just putting the book down to mull over what I've just 'seen.' As in this passage from Jack McDevitt's 2004 novel Polaris. Here, Jack is describing Sacracour, the inhabited moon of the gas giant Gobulus, which orbits its star at a distance of 160 million kilometers: Most of the planet's contemporary inhabitants -- there are fewer than three hundred thousand altogether -- live along a seacoast that's usually warm and invigorating. Lots of beach and sun. Great sky views. They haven't yet achieved tidal lock, so if you time things right you can sit out on the beach and watch Gobulus, with its rings and its system of moons, rise out of the ocean. Small descriptions like that dazzle me, the off-hand...

Will life spread out from Earth to flourish in the cosmos? Freeman Dyson has always supported the idea, and with great persuasiveness. BBC Four has created an archive of interviews on its Web site, among which is a clip of Dyson discussing life's variety and the imperative of broadening its range. The theoretical physicist, who played an important role in the development of the 'atomic spaceship' concept called Project Orion, doesn't believe man's role is simply to send the occasional astronaut out in what he calls 'a metal can' to look out a window. Image: Physicist Freeman Dyson, whose thoughts on life's spread into the cosmos can be found in the BBC archives. Credit: Dartmouth College. On the contrary, says Dyson in his interview, humans may have a shepherding role in building a permanent presence in space. Instead of ships full of scientists or colony vessels establishing a new human foothold, Dyson would argue that we humans are representative of a far larger pattern, the spread...

By Larry Klaes Years after Apollo, I ran into Frank Borman in a pilot's lounge at a southern airport. I was waiting for a student who wanted to use the lowering weather to practice instrument approaches. Borman was just passing through. Then CEO of Eastern Airlines, he was accompanied by lawyers and was busy signing papers. I wanted to tell Apollo 8's commander what that mission had meant to me, but I found myself completely tongue-tied. How to even begin to express what that first human presence around the Moon meant to all of us, and how to say it in ways that hadn't been said a thousand times before? Larry Klaes is, fortunately, at no such loss of words as he describes what many still see as the most daring mission ever flown, and the stunning images and audio it sent back on that Christmas Eve forty years ago. On Christmas Eve in 1968, three men took turns reading aloud from the Book of Genesis in the Bible. Such an event might not be terribly unusual then or now, considering the...

When you're thinking long-term, a period of 5.7 years seems like a mere blip in time. But NASA's Long Duration Exposure Facility, deployed from the shuttle Challenger in 1984 and returned to Earth after 32,422 orbits, is a small-scale experiment that points to much weightier objectives. Think about the Voyager spacecraft, launched in 1977 and still operational after thirty-one years. Now ponder journeys to the heliopause and beyond, and potential missions to other stars that could last centuries. To learn how materials hold up in the space environment, we use tools like LDEF to collect data that can be gathered nowhere else. 57 experiments were mounted in 86 trays on the outside of the spacecraft, involving more than 200 principal investigators from private companies, universities, NASA centers, the Department of Defense and eight foreign countries. The idea was to study what happened to various materials when they were exposed to space, and as the Long Now Foundation's Kevin Kelly...

What might make a star particularly interesting from a SETI point of view? Bruce Cordell looks at the question in a post in the latest Carnival of Space, drawing on a JBIS article by Martin Beech ("Terraformed Planets and SETI," February 2008). The method seems to be to examine the ratio of a star's age to its Main Sequence lifetime. Beech does this for 123 stars with known exoplanets, making the interesting point that terraformed planets might throw a particular observational signal in systems with the right ratio. Three are particularly promising for future study: HD4308, HD190360, and 70 Virginis. Pondering all this, Cordell writes: If habitable planets are discovered near these or similar stars, ebullient Earth-bound astronomers contemplating interstellar voyages will check their spectra, to see if 'the lights are on' just in case any ETI's are home. A star of a certain age, in other words, may have been around long enough to allow an extraterrestrial civilization not only to...

Be sure to have a look at New Scientist's special coverage of science fiction, from which this (in an article by Marcus Chown): "As well as a mere storytelling device, science fiction often articulates our present-day concerns and anxieties - paradoxically, it is often about the here and now rather than the future. As Stephen Baxter points out..., H. G. Wells's ground-breaking 1895 novella The Time Machine - famous for popularising the idea of time travel - was more concerned with where Darwinian natural selection was taking the human race than with the actual nuts and bolts of time travel. In the 1968 novel Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner imagined the dire consequences of overpopulation. Arthur C. Clarke's The Lion of Comarre explored the terrible allure of computer-generated artificial realities, which - god forbid - people might actually choose over the far-from-seductive messiness of the real world. All of these books are about imagining where present-day, often worrying,...