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?...

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...