With our eyes on a proposed interstellar future, we don't want to neglect the real challenges of preserving the steps taken along the way. I'm thinking about this because of a post on an astronomy list (thanks to Larry Klaes for the pointer) by Richard Sanderson, who is curator of physical science at the Springfield Science Museum (MA). Sanderson is worried about the media upon which we store our information, and for good reason. Here's the issue in a nutshell: The difficulties that future historians may encounter are related to the ephemeral nature of digital information and the media used to store it. I can visit an old monastery in Europe, find a giant leather-bound astronomy book from the 17th century, blow off the dust, open it, and read the pages (provided I can read Latin). The only tools required are my eyes and hands. But imagine someone living in the 23rd or 24th century who finds an old box of computer diskettes or CDs. Even if the diskettes haven't been corrupted and the...

There are several reasons to keep an eye on Rosetta, the European Space Agency's mission to comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. In 2014, the spacecraft will go into orbit around the comet before deploying a lander to the nucleus. Watching changes as the comet heads toward the Sun should prove interesting indeed, but these short term effects take place within a provocative longer-term context. For aboard Rosetta is a 2.8-inch diameter disc inside a small glass sphere containing some 6000 pages of information. The subject: The languages of planet Earth, many of which will disappear before century's end. The synergy here is fascinating. The Rosetta Stone, one of the most impressive objects in the British Museum when you realize what you're looking at, contains inscriptions that include Egyptian hieroglyphics, Demotic and classical Greek. The Greek, readily understood by linguists, helped researchers unravel the meaning of the hieroglyphics, a pioneering task performed 200 years ago at the...

Hanny's Voorwerp, that odd object discovered by Dutch school teacher Hanny van Arkel via the Galaxy Zoo project, has provoked press reaction all over the world. And Chris Lintott, a key player in the Galaxy Zoo's ongoing survey of galaxies, notes the uneasiness he feels in discussing theories about the object before the paper that attempts to explain it has even gone through peer review. The speed with which the Internet allows science to be discussed can be disconcerting, as Lintott makes clear in the latest edition of the Space Carnival, conducted this week by David Chandler at his Next Generation site. Now the Galaxy Zoo is doing good science in an obviously public fashion. Anyone can sign up to participate in the classification of the images of one million galaxies drawn from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, and that makes participating computer users scientific collaborators. Seeing this, the Galaxy Zoo blogs about its work out of a sense of obligation to its contributors, but...

The latest Carnival of Space is now available at the Mars Odyssey blog, where Nancy Houser has gathered space-themed materials from the past week, many of them dealing with the question of perchlorates on Mars and the implications of that possible discovery. I'll send you straight to the Carnival for the perchlorate story, where many bloggers dissect it. My usual practice is to focus on Carnival items that connect to our theme here on Centauri Dreams -- articles about deep space starting with the outer planets and moving to regions beyond. This week the entry that fits that bill is Brian Wang's article in NextBigFuture on radiation shielding. Although Brian couches this work in the context of solutions to radiation exposure following nuclear attacks, it's also true that a drug that is 5000 times more effective at reducing the effects of radiation injury than the drugs we currently use has interesting space implications. The experimental drug, intriguingly named Nanovector Trojan...

Tibor Pacher has gone out on a limb. The founder of peregrinus interstellar and an active supporter of interstellar research, the Heidelberg-trained physicist (now a freelance software consultant) has made a wager on the Long Bets site that should raise eyebrows: "The first true interstellar mission, targeted at the closest star to the Sun or even farther, will be launched before or on December 6, 2025 and will be widely supported by the public." Note that no crew is assumed, the vehicle presumably being an unmanned flyby probe. We must also assume it will be targeted at the nearest star system, Alpha Centauri. Even so, to pull off the attempt in a mere seventeen years? But my friend Tibor is a gadfly as well as an optimist. He knows as well as anyone that the time frame is outrageous, but he wants to inspire discussion and keep people thinking about interstellar issues. In the same spirit, he notes the motivations that exist, from the challenge of a seemingly impossible destination...

Is the urge for exploration innate to our species, or is it a vestigial disorder? Rand Simberg takes on the question at The Space Review this week, an article I came across thanks to a link at Music of the Spheres, which hosts the latest Carnival of Space this week. If you have an interest in simulators and flying (and as a now inactive but still interested CFII, I can relate to that!), you'll want to be reading Music of the Spheres regularly. It's a fine and enthusiastic blog frequently updated with space-related software discussions, and one I've been reading for years to follow Bruce's adventures with the ORBITER simulator. But back to exploration: Simberg questions whether the exploratory impulse isn't disruptive in modern society, pointing out that most people in the world live out their lives within miles of the place where they were born, and suggesting that those who want to push a human agenda in space need a better justification than this. The candidates? Fear is one, as in...

It dawned on me over the weekend that Centauri Dreams will soon enter its fifth year of operation, the anniversary being in mid-August. On Sunday I walked the neighborhood, musing over the changes the site has seen and thinking back to its inception. I realized that the actual germ of the idea goes back not to 2004 but to 1986. In those days I was, among other things, writing wine and restaurant reviews, and I found myself in Winston-Salem NC, where I had been sent to review some hot new bistro or other. That night in my hotel room I watched a news item on Voyager, which had just encountered Uranus, and reflected about human futures. The thinking went like this: Launched in 1977, the Voyagers could accomplish their prime mission easily within the lifetimes of those who sent them (their extended mission beyond the heliopause wasn't much discussed back then). But I began to imagine truly long-haul missions that would be brought home not by the people who sent them but by the next...

The latest Carnival of Space is now available, with several items of particular interest to those of us fixated on deep space from the edge of the Solar System to nearby stars. Have a look, for example, at this take (from Astronomy at the CCSSC) on Makemake, a dwarf planet in the newly minted IAU sense, and also a plutoid, meaning a dwarf planet outside Neptune's orbit. Or try Starts with a Bang, where the speculation runs to placing human crews on long-haul starships using artificial incubators and frozen embryos, a subject we recently touched on in these pages. My attention was particularly drawn to Bruce Cordell's piece on How Great Explorations Really Work, in an intriguing site called 21st Century Waves. Here the idea is that great exploratory projects (think Apollo, for example) do not happen at random times, but tend to cluster around a 56-year energy cycle that coincides with major economic booms. My experience with the stock market tells me that when anyone identifies a...

We usually picture the far future in terms of the most exotic possibilities. And why not: Getting to the stars with warp drive or wormhole makes the entire galaxy accessible. But while we work toward such goals, a raft of technologies continue to develop that can get us to another star with currently understood physics. Imagine, for example, a starship pushed to ten percent of lightspeed by a powerful laser array, a tiny vessel enabled by nanotechnology to carry a cargo of human genetic material. I played around with the concept years ago in a story called "Until Anna Changed," which dealt with a colony around another star whose inhabitants had all been raised upon arrival by their starship's crew, beings called Adepts who were manifestations of artificial intelligence. The Adepts were to move on to another star when the colony was mature enough to survive, but the story looked at what happened to a particular colonist when his own Adept unexpectedly returned. The dynamics of growth...

The 60th Carnival of Space is now up at Slacker Astronomy, and if you want to see some fine science writing, I'll point you this week to the host, whose essay on Regulus shows what can be done when a scientist with serious writing skills takes apart an interesting scientific paper. Doug Welch knows what he's talking about -- he's a professor of physics and astronomy at McMaster University (Hamilton, ONT), deeply involved in dark matter studies, supernovae and variable stars. So it's no surprise that the interesting story of Regulus and its apparent companion comes alive in Slacker Astronomy's pages. What about Regulus? A team led by Doug Gies (Georgia State) has studied this bright, ecliptic-hugging star for evidence of a hitherto unknown companion. The result: They found that Regulus was indeed a spectroscopic binary. Once every 40.11 days, the system completes one orbit. Regulus itself has a mass of about 3.4 times that of the Sun. The companion of Regulus is much less massive -...

Projects that take more than a single generation to complete -- the Ultimate Project that would build a multi-generational starship is a classic example -- keep the issue of long-term thinking bubbling in these pages. The immense distances to the stars almost force the issue upon us. I'm reminded of something Hoppy Price told me at JPL five years ago. I was researching my Centauri Dreams book and we had been discussing the idea that scientists should see the end of the projects they start. "Robert Forward talked about getting there in fifty years or less, a time scale that seemed to make sense because it would equal the possible lifetime involvement of a researcher," Price said. "What may be more reasonable is to take a little more time. Because we're also working on the beginnings of a program to build very long lifetime electronics, systems that can operate for up to two hundred years. If you let yourself take two, even three hundred years to get there, the problem of propulsion...

This week's Carnival of Space is up at Universe Today, and out of the mix I'll point you to Ian O'Neill's musings on the perceived accuracy of science. It's a look at how tentative research findings can be misunderstood, a phenomenon that's hardly new and often blamed on the media. But is it the media's fault? In many cases, even a balanced newspaper or TV story can be taken out of context when given a potentially misleading headline. Thus a 1983 story on observations by NASA's Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS) received a headline ("Possibly as Large as Jupiter; Mystery Heavenly Body Discovered") that needlessly limited a research result that had led scientists to speculate on everything from an object near the Solar System to something of extra-galactic origin. It's hard to fault the Washington Post, which ran the story, for the bizarre transfiguration of this object into a proto-star or possibly a planet that was sure to collide with Earth, but this seems to have occurred in...

I usually point readers to articles on interstellar issues when the weekly Carnival of Space comes out. But this time, with the polar regions of Mars on everyone's mind, I'll focus instead on the Red Planet. Todd Flowerday, who hosts the current Carnival at his Catholic Sensibility site, obviously shares my predilection. Todd's been following space issues on his blog for quite some time and is a long-term correspondent, so it's good to see him involved with the Carnival. He leads the parade this week with Cumbrian Sky's helpful compilation of information and links related to the flight of the Phoenix. Today, of course, is the big day. We can all, I think, understand the apprehension and anticipation of Cumbrian Sky's post, as so well conveyed in this passage: ...during the landing itself I'll be watching TWO monitors, not just one; my laptop is going to be... displaying the amazing real-time JPL animation/simulation of Phoenix's Entry, Descent and Landing. I'll start that playing at...

I was anticipating a particular punch-line in Michelle Nijhuis' interesting article on communicating with extraterrestrials (Christian Science Monitor, May 15), and sure enough, it came where it should have, at the very end. Nijhuis quotes Jeffrey Lockwood (University of Wyoming): "In a sense, all writing is writing for extraterrestrials." Lockwood, who teaches creative writing at the University of Wyoming, understands a deep truth. Communication between two people of the same species can be profoundly mysterious and often filled with misconceptions. How, then, would we ever communicate with an extraterrestrial culture? Assume we receive, at long last, a signal from the stars that is unmistakably an attempt to communicate. After long debate, we decide to respond, describing who we are as a species. Which of these statements, drawn from a class Lockwood teaches on the subject, offers the best ten-word summary of the human condition? We are an adolescent species searching for our...

Alan Boyle uses the occasion of Neal Turok's appointment as executive director of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics to interview the scientist on topics dear to the heart of Centauri Dreams readers. The ekpyrotic universe idea championed by Turok uses the idea of multidimensional 'branes' whose occasional collisions spark events like the Big Bang. A cyclic model emerges that sees multiple 'bangs,' using today's accelerating universe as a condition for the arrival of the next cycle. It's fascinating stuff, but does it assume the eventual validation of string theory? Boyle quotes Turok: "In my opinion, string theory is the most promising avenue we have for the unification of gravity and the fundamental forces. But that doesn't mean I'm not critical of it. I think sometimes people do exaggerate its achievements thus far. We need to keep an open mind." Turok, as director of Cambridge University's Center for Theoretical Cosmology, worked with Princeton's Barry Steinhardt on...

astroENGINE.com hosts the 51st Carnival of Space, a lengthy compilation indeed, from which I'll draw Ian Musgrave's interesting post on a possible transit at 83 Leonis as the feature of the week. If you want to find out what it's like to get your hands dirty juggling the data, trying to sift out signal from noise and working with all the imponderables that go into spotting the signature of a transiting world, have a look. Ian finds a noisy 83 Leonis but one that just might show a transit. A self-described 'mathematically challenged biologist,' this is a writer whose work is always worth watching. In this case, what he's doing reflects the broadening participation of amateurs in exoplanet projects, an idea Greg Laughlin has championed, so it's no surprise to see that Ian has drawn from Laughlin's expertise in his current work.