Sometimes it's hard to believe that Stephen Hawking is only sixty-six. Not just because of his indomitable fight against Lou Gehrig's disease, which is a story in its own right, but because his position at the summit of modern physics has kept him in the public eye for an exceedingly long time. Now, in a speech commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of NASA, Hawking has taken aim at the question of why space matters. And it's not surprising that this Star Trek fan quoted his favorite show. "If the human race is to continue for another million years, we will have to boldly go where no one has gone before ... It will not solve any of our immediate problems on planet Earth, but it will give us a new perspective on them and... Hopefully, it will unite us to face a common challenge." But of course, that question of solving our immediate problems on Earth is what is often subject to debate. Although the space budget is usually overestimated (a recent conversation illustrated this, a friend...

The Kentucky space program may get back to the Moon before NASA or the Chinese. If that sounds cryptic, do visit the latest Carnival of Space, held on Wayne Hall's KySat Online site, which supports this innovative and student-led program to get the educational system into the business of designing, building, and operating small satellites. Wayne writes: The very first project of this ambitious enterprise is a cooperative, student-led effort to design, build and fly a CubeSat that kids from the eastern mountains to the western Mississippi river shore can figuratively reach out and touch from classrooms all over the state. The first of many planned efforts, it will rocket to orbit sometime late this year or early next. Good fortune accompany the attempt! I hope many states are watching what Kentucky is doing, an educational activity that spreads interest and enthusiasm for space projects to the next generation of scientists. As to the Carnival itself, I normally choose one post of...

Is observation critical to existence? Niels Bohr believed that it was the collapse of the wave function that gave particles like electrons their distinct reality. John Wheeler, who knew and worked with the great figures of quantum mechanics, summarized the gap between that point of view and Einstein's by quoting three baseball umpires: Number 1: I calls 'em like I see 'em. Number 2: I calls 'em the way they are. Number 3: They ain't nothing till I calls 'em. Michio Kaku reports this story in his book Parallel Worlds, noting this: "To Wheeler, the second umpire is Einstein,who believed there was an absolute reality outside human experience. Einstein called this 'objective reality,' the idea that objects can exist in definite states without human intervention. The third umpire is Bohr, who argued that reality existed only after an observation was made." Image: Albert Einstein, Hideki Yukawa and John A. Wheeler. Credit: Johns Hopkins University. Out of such conundrums John Wheeler made...

The 49th Carnival of Space is up at Will Gater's site, and this week I'll point you in particular to Alan Boyle's entry on black hole simulations. The mathematics of black hole collisions are not for the faint of heart, but the Rochester Institute of Technology's supercomputer cluster seems up to the task, even if the work demanded a week to complete. Interesting stuff, as an actual triple black hole collision as simulated here should generate gravity waves of the sort being sought by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO). But LIGO scientists need to know what to look for amidst the incoming tsunami of data, which is where supercomputer modeling comes into play. Boyle's presentation of this work is thorough and, as always, admirably clear. There are actually not one but two space carnivals at play this week, the other being Fraser Cain's at Universe Today. But rather than drawing on already written weblog entries, Fraser solicited comments from bloggers on a...

Centauri Dreams congratulates frequent correspondent Adam Crowl on the birth of his fifth child. Well done in Australia! Mother and eight pound, two-ounce boy are doing well. The newcomer will doubtless keep Adam busy, but not enough, let's hope, to slow down his contributions here, or his continuing work on Crowlspace. If I still smoked, I'd light a cigar in honor of the event, but a nice Barossa Valley Shiraz I can manage...

Hard to believe today marks forty years since the debut of 2001: A Space Odyssey. I saw it at the old Loew's State Theater on Washington Ave. in St. Louis, my home town. I vividly remember that gorgeous lobby, long marble stairs, and being taken to my seat by an usher -- they had ushers in movie theaters in those days -- who was one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen. So taken was I with my fleeting glimpse of her that it took a while to compose myself, but fortunately the long introductory scene of 2001 pre-Monolith allowed me time to get my head re-oriented toward the early humanoids. By the time the Pan American shuttle was closing on the space station, I was fixated on the Clarke/Kubrick future, awash in visuals that haunt me to this day. I still think the ending was needlessly minimalist, but what an experience!

Did short supplies of oxygen and molybdenum slow down the evolution of animal life? Ancient oceans low on molybdenum would create problems for bacteria that use the element to convert atmospheric nitrogen into a form useful for living things. Brian Wang muses over these matters in his entry in the latest Carnival of Space, referring to a recent Nature paper and moving on to look at potential oceans in the Solar System, from Titan to Callisto, Ganymede, Enceladus, and of course, Europa. Can life could develop in such places, and if so, how long would it take? Brian frames the question in relation to the Fermi paradox. Perhaps the universe takes a lot longer to evolve complex life than we have been assuming, with implications for what we might find on planets around other stars. We're shooting in the dark on these questions, unable to say whether life exists off-planet in our own Solar System, but the day may not be so far off when results around nearby planets give us another...

I'm a great believer in getting back to work when bad news hits, and I suspect Arthur C. Clarke was as well. His almost 100 books surely attest to the fact. With intriguing exoplanet news about to be released, that is exactly what I've been doing this morning, with an article I'll post tomorrow. As I've been developing that story, I've kept pondering what to say about Clarke, working up a kind of reminiscence in the back of my mind, then deciding everything was happening too fast for that. Not that his death was a surprise, Sir Arthur having been ill for quite some time, but the thought of a world without Clarke in it takes a bit of getting used to. I'll need some time to take its measure. Oddly, my favorite of his books was the relatively obscure 1957 collection Tales from the White Hart. The yarns in this slim volume involve one Harry Purvis, like Clarke a polymath who deals knowledgeably on most any subject, and a man whose improbable accounts flummox the ready audience in the...

No time this evening to do anything more than pass along the sad news that we have lost one of our greatest visionaries. The BBC has the story, and the New York Times offers a lengthy obituary.

Does transhumanism have a serious objective? The question resonates oddly yet provocatively given the stakes being considered. Augmenting the human frame potentially expands our powers, while the goal of uploading consciousness seems to offer a kind of immortality. These are surely desirable steps, but some versions of a posthuman future seem to point toward triviality, an existence within a simulated reality within a computational matrix, an awareness that sees no need to explore when simulation and observation can suffice. Can we avoid such a result? I have a visceral, non-digital sense that a 'singularity,' if it occurs, will not include pushing minds evolved over eons to cope with a physical biosphere into digital frameworks. I doubt seriously that a human consciousness could make the adaptation -- madness is the likely result. Hardly an expert on any of the relevant disciplines, I could well be wrong, but I noted Athena Andreadis' thoughts on this issue in a recent entry on her...

Science fiction has brought us so many concepts for colonizing the stars over the last hundred years, everything from interstellar arks loading thousands of colonists (the sea-faring metaphor) to worldships that see generations of crewmembers live and die during their long joiurney. Suspended animation can get people through a trip that takes centuries, while robotic wardens might oversee the safe passage of human genetic material that could be converted into a colony upon arrival. If you want to be on the cutting edge today, though, better look toward what George Dvorsky talks about in Seven ways to control the Galaxy with self-replicating probes. Here's a novel way to colonize a distant star system: Let a von Neumann probe find a promising planet and use the matter it finds there to establish a colony and fill it with settlers. Not the kind of settler that gets out of a suspended animation tank, yawns, stretches, and then walks out onto an alien landscape, but an uploaded...

Ever since I was a kid watching Adventures in Paradise on TV, I've had a yen for islands, the more remote the better. The show had quite a pull on a young imagination, as skipper Gardner McKay sailed the waters of French Polynesia in his schooner, turning up beautiful women and adventure at most every port. The thought of someday threading through the Tuamotus or setting out for Nuku Hiva and the Marquesas made my spirit soar, and to this day my fascination with maps is undiminished. So you can imagine how I studied the image below, and the kind of speculations it triggered. Because when you look at a map, you try to put yourself there in your mind, and perhaps no islands are more challenging to imagine than the ones pictured here. The work of San Diego middle school teacher Peter Minton (and thanks to Frank Taylor for the pointer), they're based on Cassini imagery peering through the murk of Titan's atmosphere at what seems to be an island group in a methane sea. Assuming, of...

The 43rd Carnival of Space is now available on Ethan Siegel's Starts with a Bang site, entertainingly offered in an 'Oscar winner' format that highlights an impressive array of contributions this week. The one I'll send you to first from an outer planets perspective is Bruce Irving's story on Music of the Spheres about robotic operations in extreme environments. Think Antarctica for upcoming tests, and Europa for long-term uses of this promising technology. The helpful video that accompanies the piece features Bill Stone (Stone Aerospace), whose underwater vehicle Endurance is now undergoing tests in Wisconsin.

A friend of mine who knows more about classical music than anyone I've ever met, and who has turned his passion for it into a second career, asked me a question a few years ago that stays with me. A great admirer of Toscanini, he wondered whether some of the the conductor's prodigious output was in some sense still 'out there.' For Toscanini went to work in New York after he left Italy, conducting the first broadcast concert of the NBC Symphony Orchestra in 1937. His NBC broadcasts were, of course, recorded, but my friend's thoughts had turned interstellar and he wondered where those radio signals were now. We discussed radio signals propagating outwards at the speed of light, so that a 1937 broadcast would now be 71 light years out, and in answer to his query, I said yes, if you could somehow position yourself through superluminal means 71 light years from here, you would be on the wavefront as the initial Toscanini broadcast swept over you. But, I assured him, you wouldn't be able...

The 42nd Carnival of Space is online at Chris Lintott's Universe, good reading for the weekend and a way to keep up with the growing number of astronomy weblogs. Centauri Dreams readers in particular will want to check out Emily Lakdawalla's Showing Off Saturn's Moons, examining these exotic bodies in connection with the recent series of articles on Cassini findings in Icarus. Emily discusses image techniques and also links to a Microsoft Access-formatted database of all Cassini images released to the general public up until now. Great stuff for those looking for imagery either for publication or the sheer wonder of the scenery.

'Closed time-like curves' are just the ticket if you want to travel in time. Theoretically, a sufficient distortion of spacetime could make a time machine possible, but Irina Aref'eva and Igor Volovich (Steklov Mathematical Institute, Moscow) take the idea out of the purely theoretical by suggesting that the Large Hadron Collider set to debut this summer at CERN may provide sufficient energy to create a tunnel through time. A tiny tunnel, to be sure, sufficient solely for subatomic particles, but a possible demonstration of wormhole concepts that on a far larger scale could one day prove productive for fast transportation to distant places and remote times. But as to the argument that the LHC's operations could establish Year Zero for time travelers (creating the needed first instance of a time machine to which future travelers would be able to return), I'll take a pass. Surely if massive energies are what it takes to establish such a wormhole (itself a purely theoretical concept,...

Sending data-rich broadband signals between the stars is no easy matter. Interstellar gas has the effect of disrupting such signals, the result varying depending upon the frequency. Narrow-band signals are easy, broadband hard. But Seth Shostak reports on galactic Wi-Fi, looking at Swedish work that exploits orbital angular momentum, a 'twisting of the wave's electric and magnetic fields,' that may allow much more information to be encoded in the same signal without the disruption that distances in the hundreds of light years invariably impose. One signal becomes a cipher for another, with obvious SETI implications. ------- New Scientist (behind its firewall, alas) looks at the work of Alexander Shatskiy (Lebedev Physical Institute, Moscow) on how to detect a wormhole. Shatskiy's paper "Passage of Photons Through Wormholes and the Influence of Rotation on the Amount of Phantom Matter around Them" (abstract) makes the pitch that something called 'phantom matter' could hold the mouth...

Do technological cultures survive their growing pains? Species extinction through war or unintended environmental consequences -- a cap upon the growth of civilizations -- could be one solution to the Fermi question. They're not here because they're not there, having left ruined cities and devastated planets in their wake, just as we will. It's a stark picture whether true or not, one that makes us ponder how the things we do with technology affect our future. Consider the question in terms of time. The Holocene epoch, in which we live, began about 10,000 BC, incorporating early periods of human technology back to the rise of farming amd the growing use of metals. And while there has been scant time for true evolutionary change in animal and plant life during this short period, it is certainly true that extinctions of many large animals as we move from the late Pleistocene into the early Holocene have not only changed the world through which humans moved but may have been at least...

The universe so frequently sends the message that we humans are not entirely special. In fact, the notion of us as 'privileged observers' seemed to be dead as recently as a few years ago. Over the centuries we had learned that the Sun did not revolve around us, nor was the Sun itself the center of the cosmos, and with the understanding of its true position in a galaxy of stars, Sol became just another G-type star circled by planets. The recent 'rare Earth' hypothesis does challenge the idea that our planet is of a kind likely to be found elsewhere, but exoplanet discoveries will soon tell us whether or not Earth-like worlds really are common. We may be getting used to the idea of Earth as just one of the vast billions of planets that are doubtless sprinkled through the Milky Way, but we have a long way to go in terms of our thinking about the future. For the one place where that sense of privilege seems to remain is in the idea that having achieved our planetary dominance, we are...

The 37th Carnival of Space is up at Darnell Clayton's Colony Worlds site. This week I would recommend planetary probe enthusiasts have a look at Music of the Spheres, where the talk is not just about the MESSENGER probe's visit to Mercury, but about software you can run to simulate various situations in orbital mechanics. Also check Pamela Gay's look at the Galaxy Zoo project, in which she not only offers tips for using Sloan Digital Sky Survey data but also links to an audio interview with Galaxy Zookeepers Jordan Raddick and Chris Lintott. At advanced nanotechnology, Brian Wang examines Boeing's ideas for a space gas station, but I also want to turn your attention to his interesting post on the activation of a prototype extending Robert Bussard's fusion ideas to version WB-7.