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.

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...