Too beautiful not to run immediately, this image of the Corona Australis region (be sure to click to enlarge) shows a relatively nearby hotbed of star formation. The Coronet cluster at its heart is a loose cluster of several dozen stars, all of them young but ranging widely in mass. Here we're looking at the Coronet in different wavelengths. The purple areas come from X-ray observations made by the Chandra observatory. The Spitzer Space Telescope contributes its infrared data, shown in orange, green and cyan. Regions like this offer valuable clues to star formation. Credit: NASA/CXC/JPL-Caltech/CfA. ------- Next on my stack of reading material is Gregory Benford and Elisabeth Malartre's Beyond Human: Living with Robots and Cyborgs (Forge, 2007), an overview of current thinking in robotics and artificial intelligence. Publisher's Weekly notes the following, which is sure to be controversial: [The] concluding argument, that consciousness and the intellectual power of the human mind...

The IdeaFestival, launched today and continuing through the 15th in Louisville KY, looks at topics ranging from parallel worlds (Michio Kaku) to robot 'swarm' intelligence (James McLurkin), and throws in cutting edge ideas from numerous other disciplines. Breakthrough thinking can emerge from the synergies between science, the arts, technology, film, business and education. Thus the event's charter, "IF promotes out-of-the-box thinking and cross-fertilization of knowledge as a means toward the development of innovative ideas, products and creative endeavors." If you're anywhere near Louisville, the festival is well worth your time. A regular event since 2000, it's being live-blogged by Wayne Hall and others (check the IF site for information and the RSS feed). I see that Ray Bradbury wil be 'beaming in,' while Steve Wozniak should pepper the event with projections on the future of high tech. Getting ideas energized and publicized is at the core of the concept. The agenda, speaker...

What would be the best design for a submarine that could explore the deep and possibly life-bearing ocean beneath Europa's ice? Carl Ross (University of Portsmouth, UK) has been pondering the matter, proposing a 3-meter long cylindrical vehicle made perhaps of a ceramic composite to offer the best combination of strength and buoyancy. And for getting through the ice itself? "It may be that we will require a nuclear pressurized water reactor on board the robot submarine to give us the necessary power and energy to achieve this." Details to be found in A Submarine for Europa, recently published on Universe Today. ------- If your sense of wonder could use the occasional jolt (and this can happen to us all), do check out the work of another Ross, Aaron by name. The film student has put together a terrific short (first noted here on The Discovery Enterprise) based on Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama. Ross manages to capture in just a few minutes the mystery and majesty surrounding...

The Sun's evolution from protostar to stability on the main sequence, then red giant and, finally, white dwarf plays out over a bit more than twelve billion years, according to figures provided by Adam Crowl. Earth, of course, dies long before the white dwarf stage; in fact, life a mere billion years from now will be getting seriously problematic on Terra. Could future civilizations engineer a longer lifetime by controlling the Sun's energy? This ingenious post on Crowlspace runs through the options, from inducing convection via magnetic manipulation to controlling gravitational collapse. 20 trillion years of energy hang in the balance. ------- "The arts and sciences are connected," sys Ray Bradbury. "Scientists have to have a metaphor. All scientists start with imagination." True enough, and those mind-bending tales of Martian cities and a thousand other fantastic notions never relied heavily on scientific accuracy. But they challenged us all to dream big dreams, as Bradbury has...

Google Sky is a terrific idea, letting you roam at will through the heavens in a realm of high resolution imagery and information overlays that becomes a useful teaching tool as well as a dazzling personal excursion. The new feature mines imagery from the Space Telescope Science Institute, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and many other sources. The latest version of Google Earth is needed to use it. To keep up with Google Sky developments, you should be reading Frank Taylor's Google Earth Blog, which now includes a 'Sky' category in its archives. Frank's original Sky announcement includes a video demonstrating how Google Sky works. ------- How many stars are in the Milky Way? I notice that SETI optimists tend to higher numbers, usually citing 400 billion, while SETI pessimists lean toward 200 or even 100 million (the number I remember being taught back in the 1960s). This outstanding video is optimistic indeed, claiming a whopping 500 billion, but whatever the number, its look at the...

The 17th Carnival of Space is now available, hosted by The Planetary Society's Emily Lakdawalla. Astronomy Down Under offers some useful advice on choosing binoculars for celestial observing, while Brian Wang's scenario for space technology in 2057 looks at what's coming through the lenses of nanotechnology, advanced fission and fusion. Will carbon nanotubes lead to high-performance solar sails? Plenty to speculate about in this one, and an interesting set of links all around.

The scientific world has lost a true renaissance man (and indeed, one with an interest in Renaissance-era technology) with the death of Ronald Bracewell. The intellect of the Stanford mathematician, physicist and radio engineer ranged across many disciplines, nursing a fascination with etymology, cataloguing varieties of California trees, developing his university's radio astronomy capabilities and of course, speculating on extraterrestrial civilizations and how they might reach us. The Stanford News Service offers an overview of his rich and crowded life. Bracewell's work had wide repercussions, as Umran Inan, professor of electrical engineering at Stanford, recalls: "Many of Ron's inventions have flourished in other fields of science and engineering. For example, CAT scans and, basically, the imaging of objects by scanning them through radio and electromagnetic methods are all things that originated with him." For those of us focused on space, Bracewell's work on radiotelescopes...

Carnival of Space #16 is now available at Brian Wang's Advanced Nanotechnology site. Particularly recommended is an essay we also looked at recently here, Alex Bonnici's discussion of Dandridge Cole and his visionary outlook on using asteroids for the good of mankind. And you'll also want to read Mark Whittington's look at what the next fifty years may bring in space travel. If fifty years rings a bell, it may be because you're thinking of the upcoming anniversary of Sputnik. Let's hope the next fifty years manage a more consistent pace of development...

by Bernd Henschenmacher Giancarlo Genta's new book Lonely Minds in the Universe deals with many aspects of the search for extraterrestrial life and intelligence. As does Michael Michaud in his Contact with Alien Civilizations, Genta examines the scientific and philosophical implications of such contact. The book begins with an overview of Western thought on the subject from the ancient Greeks to the late 20th Century, including the question of how extraterrestrial contact might affect human religious beliefs. The book's astrobiological chapters offer a rapid introduction to this emerging science. Readers who are familiar with concepts like habitable zones, speculations about life on Mars, Europa or Titan and the concept of a galactic habitable zone will find little new here, but this section offers a well written and easy to understand backgrounder. The book's treatment of evolution, intelligence and consciousness -- including the problem of defining consciousness itself -- is...

American aerospace engineer Dandridge MacFarland Cole, who died just over forty years ago, was an early advocate of exploring the asteroids, advocating their eventual colonization in his book Islands in Space: The Challenge of the Planetoids. Alex Michael Bonnici takes a look at this fascinating figure, placing him in the tradition of Tsiolkovsky and Goddard as a futurist whose thinking challenged us to think big. Among his startling ideas was the use of asteroids as interstellar arks or generation ships. Bonnici's tribute is well deserved and highly recommended. ------- The Galaxy Zoo continues to draw remarkable traffic. Launched in mid-July, this project to categorize galactic images taps the volunteer efforts of users from all over the planet. Users have thus far inspected almost seven million images and produced more than 12.3 million galaxy classifications. The Galaxy Zoo has now enrolled 85,000 participants, and is again demonstrating the power of networking to do things...

The 15th Carnival of Space is now up at Star Stryder. The case that Colony Worlds makes for a human presence on Callisto is particularly worth your time, as is Cumbrian Sky's look at the Flight of the Phoenix.

With the Phoenix Mars lander now on its way, it's interesting to see how communications will be handled during the crucial descent phase next spring. So that the final thirteen minutes to the surface will be well monitored, Phoenix will transmit a continuous data stream to NASA satellites already in orbit around Mars. And the European Space Agency's Mars Express will play a key role, its elliptical orbit offering a vital communications window. How networking is established on and around Mars presages the day when networks link probes throughout the Solar System, sparing us the need to dedicate antennae like Goldstone's to single spacecraft and making data acquisition far more efficient. ------- I had never heard of the Grupo Independente de Radio Astronomos, but Melbourne's The Age says they have transmitted messages into interstellar space, joining messages including pictures and music that have already been sent by Alexander Zaitsev and team at the Evpatoria radio telescope in the...

Carnival of Space #14 is now available at Universe Today, leading with musings on the place of space exploration in a society fixated on astronaut misbehavior, and moving on to a look at the robot vs. humans debate and its consequences. Be sure to check Colony Worlds' link to videos on asteroid encounters and Robot Guy's view of SpaceShipOne and the X-Prize flight. But for sheer scope, Universe Today's The End of Everything takes the prize, all the way out to the end of the universe as we know it. Now that's thinking long-term!

The recent deaths of three Scaled Composites employees -- Charles Glen May, 45; Eric Blackwell, 38; and Todd Ivens, 33 -- have brought sorrow to the young commercial spaceflight industry. Those wishing to support the families of the deceased as well as the employees injured in the explosion can do so through the Scaled Composites Family Support Fund. According to a statement from the National Space Society, contributions can be sent to: Scaled Family Support Fund c/o Scaled Composites 1624 Flight Line Mojave, CA. 93501 Acct # 04157-66832 Wire transfer ABA Routing #1220-0066-1 Please make checks payable to the account number or to the name of the fund. The first deaths in the civilian space sector remind us how many died during the development of aviation. Doubtless there will be more, but the forces driving our push to open up space to companies with good ideas are unlikely to be slowed. What is happening in the Mojave and elsewhere is igniting the dreams of an entirely new...

Just a note that the History Channel's series The Universe continues with a look at Saturn that is scheduled to run tonight at 9 PM EST here in the States, with a re-showing at 1 AM Wednesday morning. You can get a full schedule of repeat showings here -- I notice the Saturn show pops up several more times in early August. I've enjoyed the series so far, and as you'll see from its site, the History Channel is supporting it with various interactive features. You'll see some names familiar from Centauri Dreams stories popping up among the researchers interviewed each week.

Those who have toiled in the vineyards of literary studies may recognize the allusion in my title to Notes & Queries, a journal collecting short pieces on a variety of research topics. Back in grad school I was forever looking up odds and ends in its pages related to the Anglo-Saxon alliterative line. A far cry from the Kuiper Belt and extrasolar debris disks! But I need the occasional short feature here that, like Notes & Queries, collects things I want to highlight, each interesting, I hope, and useful to the interstellar-minded. The indefatigable Brian Wang offers a lengthy piece on External Pulsed Plasma Propulsion and nuclear rockets in general. Have a look to see a NASA study from 2000 and its design principles for EPPP, which uses thrust from plasma waves in ways reminiscent of Project Orion. The post also studies the old NERVA designs and offers numerous links for follow-ups. "We just have to have the courage to become a truly interplanetary civilization," Brian argues in...

I'm not very good at playing odds, though I do seem to pick up money routinely from a friend who is a Chicago Cubs fan (this year may be different -- we'll see). But bringing odds into the discussion of the Fermi Paradox can be an interesting exercise, and Princeton astrophysicist Richard Gott has already given the matter some thought. Let's assume, for example, that you and I are not particularly special. We're simply representative of the living beings who populate the universe. If that's the case, the odds say we're probably living in one of the older civilizations, and one of the larger ones. That's because more people would have lived in these cultures than in short-lived, smaller civilizations. It's the Copernican principle at work, the notion that there is nothing special about the particular moment at which we're observing what's around us. Gott would say this has implications for other worlds. "The sobering facts," Dr. Gott says, "are that in a 13.7 billion-year-old...

An obvious objection to the idea of human journeys to the stars is time -- if we can't find ways to reduce travel time to well within a human lifetime, so the thinking goes, then we'll have to stick with robotics. But expand the timeframe through multi-generational ships and you change the parameters of the debate. The notion of a multi-generational 'worldship' whose crewmembers have long forgotten their actual circumstance is a classic trope of science fiction, with obvious references like Robert Heinlein's story "Universe" (1941), later reprinted in Orphans of the Sky, and Brian Aldiss' Non-Stop (1958), published in the US as Starship. But maybe such a crew wouldn't forget where it was going. For that matter, would the people aboard a true worldship, one that took, say, 5000 years to make the average interstellar crossing, really consider themselves a crew? They might prefer the term 'inhabitants' when describing themselves, because they would be living inside a structure so vast...

The tenth edition of the weekly Carnival of Space is now available, with stories ranging from space-based solar power to Mars Society volunteers in the Canadian high arctic and a look at the latest in spacesuits.

The 11th edition of the monthly science carnival Philosophia Naturalis is now up at Chris Rowan's Highly Allochthonous site, where discussions move from the Higgs boson to Cassini's extended mission, with time in between to investigate puddles on Mars. Take note as well of the weekly Carnival of Space, now in its 9th edition, this week edited on the Planetary Society's weblog by the able Emily Lakdawalla. Here again the range is spacious, with musings on the atmospheres of extrasolar planets to the nano-minded Brian Wang's thoughts on laser systems that could get us to Mars. If you only have time for one, don't miss Pamela Gay's take on gravitational lenses, a fine job on a tool of ever growing importance.