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,...

Larry Klaes sends along links to four of Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe's books on panspermia, now available online. I first encountered the duo's Evolution from Space shortly after its publication in 1981, found it curious and unlikely, and went on to other things. But the idea that a microbe might make its way between planets is under greater scrutiny than ever, even if the concept of interstellar panspermia remains contentious. And I think Larry sums the matter up nicely: "Certain ideas in these works have become a bit more accepted, or at least less further from the mainstream than when they first came out. They do make for very interesting reading whether you agree with their ideas or not." The Cosmic Ancestry site offers resources on the topic here, including PDF's of Hoyle and Wickramasinghe's Space Travelers: The Bringers of Life, Viruses from Space, Living Comets and Proofs That Life Is Cosmic. ------- I'm looking at a stunning image of Saturn's rings, with a huge,...

If you can put together a consortium that takes in a variety of public and private organizations, then seed it with university expertise, you can start involving yourself in space research. Take a look at what Kentucky Space is all about. I'm reminded of its ongoing efforts by the fact that its blog is currently hosting the Carnival of Space, reporting in the introduction on its upcoming sub-orbital mission, scheduled for launch today from the Mojave desert. Kentucky Space's projects have included KySat, a student-led initiative involving small satellites from design to launch and operation. This is an active and interesting program well worth your attention, and its Web presence is ably enlivened by Wayne Hall, who presents the current Carnival materials. Of these, I point you to Colony Worlds and its enjoyable musings on dogs in space. Headed out for Mars for a couple of years, or perhaps planning on settling in a distant colony, maybe an O'Neill habitat somewhere out around L-5?...

I'm a great admirer of Princeton astrophysicist Richard Gott, who periodically breaks into the popular press because of his quirky predictions about the human future. This is not to say that I necessarily agree with his applications of the Copernican principle, many of which have proven accurate, but rather that long-term predictions ignite both my native skepticism and my fascination with what may be coming down the road. And Dr. Gott says intriguing things indeed, such as this response to the Fermi question: 'Where are the extraterrestrials?...a significant fraction must be sitting on their home planets." As you would imagine, controversy follows such thoughts, and the follow-on that we are probably a rather typical civilization with only a tiny window for getting into space that should be exploited as soon as possible. Most species go extinct -- will we be any different in the face of pandemic, nuclear war or incoming asteroid? The latest Carnival of Space is now up at Alice's...

Centauri Dreams takes an optimistic view of the human future, one in which interstellar flight becomes a reality at some point in this millennium. My impression is that we'd all better be optimists. Think about the Drake Equation. Perhaps its most significant variable is the lifetime of a technological civilization, a figure that has implications for any creatures who have developed the tools to go into space. If the lifetime of such a civilization averages a million years, then the 'where are they' question Fermi asked becomes more charged. Shouldn't we be detecting them? But if the average lifetime of a technological culture is, say, five hundred years, then we may be confronted with a galaxy filled with wreckage, planets where life persists in evolving and forming intelligent beings who bring about their own destruction. Like I say, I'd rather be an optimist, but none of us knows the real answer. I note that Jan Zalasiewicz (University of Leicester) has offered up a new book that...

The latest Carnival of Space is stuffed with good things, among them Dave Mosher's manipulations of an asteroid impact calculator run by Cardiff University's Ed Gomez. Dave works through a worst-case scenario -- a 1300-foot wide asteroid striking the East River, turning most of New York City into a crater. Fascinatingly, the impact calculator lets users adjust the parameters on such strikes, so that turning the impactor into a 400-meter piece of ice produces a crater 3.5 miles wide, two miles less than the first scenario. The calculator looks to be a great educational tool. NextBigFuture continues to study the electric sail concept, developed at the Finnish Meteorological Institute and under active examination. Electric sails ride the solar wind, but unlike magsails, they use a mesh of tethers kept at high positive voltage, held in place by centrifugal acceleration from the spinning spacecraft. Solar wind protons, repelled by the positive voltage of the mesh, create the needed...

The staggering difficulty posed by interstellar flight pushes us to imagine alternatives to today's technologies. Using conventional rocketry we're forced to amass so much propellant that the craft we want to send seem impossible to build, even if we could afford the vast fuel bill. A jacked up rocket engine is, of course, nothing but an old technology pushed to its extreme imaginative limits. And you could sense the constraints in that vision at the recent Joint Propulsion Conference in Hartford (CT), discussed not only in these pages but also here by Ray Villard. I mention Villard's comments because while I focused on Robert Frisbee's antimatter rocket concepts in my Centauri Dreams post, Ray tackles the much broader question of how we place technologies within the context of scientific progress. The news director for the Hubble Space Telescope, Villard is well versed in the rewards and challenges of spaceflight, but he's nonplussed with some of the reaction to the Hartford...

Hugh Everett's 'many worlds' interpretation of quantum mechanics spawned not just the idea of a multiverse, but apparently quite a few interpretations on what a multiverse implies. If you're intrigued by the notion that our cosmos is one of what may be an infinite number of universes, you'll want to read Dan Falk's report in Sky & Telescope on the recent multiverse conference held at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics (Waterloo, ONT). Particularly interesting is the growth of multiverse thinking as string theory has come to the fore, with all the controversy that implies. And then there's the notion of 'eternal inflation,' which conceives of endless big bangs, each creating a separate cosmos. Laura Mersini-Houghton (University of North Carolina) is concerned about how multiverses spawned by quantum theory, string theory and inflation can be reconciled, as Falk notes: ...it's not at all clear how these different kinds of multiverses - grounded in quite different physical...

What should be the goals of the next generation of X Prizes? Peter Diamandis is just the man to ask the question. It was Diamandis' foundation that led to the launch of a private manned spacecraft in 2004, and since then his team has gone on to sponsor an automotive X Prize offering $10 million to anyone who can produce a marketable car that can get 100 miles per gallon. Sixty teams are at work on that one, and prizes focusing on renewable energy are also in the works. The big fish in the pond is the Google Lunar X Prize, which offers $30 million for the first privately funded robotic mission to the Moon. Nor is Diamandis alone. In fact, the landscape is awash in prizes. The Virgin Earth Challenge, brainchild of British aviation mogul Richard Branson, offers $25 million to anyone who designs a viable way to remove greenhouse gases from the Earth's atmosphere. For that matter, what about the Saltire Prize, for which Scotland has found £10 million for renewable energy breakthroughs?...