If you possessed technologies so advanced that you could seed life throughout the cosmos, wouldn't you leave some marker that would identify your work? We can't know what a hypothetical extraterrestrial intelligence might do, but we do know enough about human nature to acknowledge the desire for recognition. It shows up every time a new squabble breaks out over who really discovered an exoplanet -- humans crave the praise of their fellows. Yes, if humans had life-seeding technologies, you can bet we would leave signs of our craftsmanship. Consider what the Keio University team working under Masaru Tomito has done in Japan. As explained in a New York Times essay by Dennis Overbye, they've inserted copies of the immortal equation E=mc2, along with the date of its derivation (1905) into the genome of a bacterium. Thus we see DNA as a kind of archival medium. Overbye is reminded of Jaron Lanier and David Sulzer's idea of encoding a year's worth of the New York Times magazine into the...

Although people have been recommending that I read Charles Stross' novel Accelerando for some time now, I haven't found the time and now wish that I had. I recently read a fascinating speech that Stross gave at a Munich tech conference discussing, among many other things, how advances in computer storage will change our lives. And now his essay The High Frontier, Redux is exciting controversy, asking whether many of our ideas about spaceflight need to be reassessed in light of the enormity of the challenges we face. Much of what Stross has to say is true, and I hope that those who haven't read the essay will give it a look. The reason why we don't want to minimize the magnitude of the problems we face in interstellar flight is that a clear-eyed view is needed to begin to conceive the radical technologies that may one day solve the problem. And I know too many people who learn how far away the stars really are, even the closest of them, and then throw the whole concept out as wishful...

Science fiction writer Charles Stross, always an insightful voice when it comes to the future of technology, offers up an incisive look at the problems of interstellar flight in his The High Frontier, Redux. The article is in the queue for discussion here, but since I can't get to it until tomorrow afternoon -- and since comments are already flying about what Stross has to say -- I'll set up this topic as a gathering point for those comments until the larger post goes online. Read Stross when you can, as anyone seriously interested in interstellar possibilities needs to understand the magnitude of the challenge. We'll run through some of the issues tomorrow, and look at one Stross comment I find completely puzzling.

Noted first on Sentient Developments, this interesting video of Michio Kaku discussing the Kardashev scale and where we fit into it. Kaku believes we are living at the critical time when our Type 0 civilization becomes a Type 1. What can happen next gets dicey indeed, as the video makes clear, and it may well be that cultures playing with nuclear weaponry have scant chance of survival, never reaching the point where, as Type 1, they control the processes of their own world and build toward Type 2, the essentially indestructible species that manages all the power of its Sun. [youtube V7FVjATcqvc] It's intriguing to speculate on how Kubrick and Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey would have been received had the initial five minutes, in which scientists discussed the robotic seeding of the galaxy, been left in the film. As it was, the mysticism and rich symbolism of the ending left many scratching their heads even while appreciating the grandeur of the story. But Frank Tipler and others...

There was a time when images like that of the space station under construction below were standard issue for futurists. It seemed inevitable that after our first tentative orbital flights, we would quickly graduate to building an enormous platform above the Earth, using it as a base for a Moon landing as well as a research establishment in its own right, even a vacation getaway for the well-heeled. It would eventually be part of the supply chain that would create and support a colony on Mars. The Pastelogram blog featured this futuristic vision by Frank Tinsley recently, done as one of a series of ads that ran in 1958 and 1959 for defense contractor American Bosch Arma. From the ad copy: New vistas in astronomy will be opened up by such a space station, because of perfect conditions for photography and spectroscopy. It will also provide unique conditions for advanced research in physics, electronics, weather prediction, etc. Three such stations, properly placed, could blanket the...

The Carnival of Space #4 is now up at Universe Today, and is well worth a look to find out what a wide range of writers are saying about everything from terraforming Mars to the linkages between science and science fiction. Ian Musgrave's Astroblog offers good background on GJ 436 b, and I particularly like Universe Today's own take on a story we're currently featuring about the expansion of the cosmos. Lots of new reading here, and busy readers will appreciate the selection process that singled these items out. A sharp editor is a godsend for the information-deluged.

History teaches that when big operations falter, small upstarts often rise to the challenge. In the case of NASA, the process may already be at work, and the upstarts are emerging: SpaceX, Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic. Out in the wilds of Las Cruces, New Mexico is building a spaceport. In fact, says Russell Saunders, Jr., the time has come to consider contingency plans. 'Saunders' is a pseudonym for a space scientist who works for a major aerospace organization. His essay appeared this afternoon on the NASA Watch site. Saunders believes NASA is fixated on an iconography that's half a century old, referring back to the spectacular space series that ran in Collier's magazine in the early 1950's. These were glorous, von Braunian visions of enormous rockets and flotillas of spacecraft pushing outward to Mars, but they're an uncomfortable fit with today's realities. Here's what Saunders is talking about: Imagine what the artists and pioneers behind the Colliers vision might have done with...

The news that NASA intends to close its Institute for Advanced Concepts has many in the space community concerned, and Centauri Dreams' comment on the matter was but one of many to fill the Net when the news broke in March. Now, however, there appears to be at least an attempt to keep the Institute alive. People who have had some connection with NIAC are being asked to step in with demonstrated benefits from its activities. That news comes via this post on the Space Elevator Blog, as passed along by Joseph Mahaney. I've just confirmed it with sources inside NIAC. Here are the areas for which contributions are solicited: Subsequent investment by NASA, other government agencies, or the private sector. Intellectual contributions that have resulted in an agency putting resources into its own studies of a concept. For example, prompted by the success of a Phase I or Phase II concept, an agency convenes panels to study the work or otherwise funds studies of its own. Unexpected spin-off...

I wish I had something profound to say about Wally Schirra. But when I think about him, what I get instead are moments. Great moments. I remember watching Schirra's Atlas booster muscling Sigma 7 downrange that day in 1962. A space-struck kid, I thought the astronaut was as cool and unflappable as any man who would ever ride a rocket. His sense of humor was irrepressible, especially in the context of hazardous early space missions. Thus the 'Jingle Bells' moment on the harmonica, and his sighting of the 'UFO' -- Santa Claus and his reindeer. "We have an object, looks like a satellite going from north to south, probably in polar orbit... I see a command module and eight smaller modules in front. The pilot of the command module is wearing a red suit..." Tom Stafford was in on that gag on Gemini 6 (he would later go on to command Apollo 10). I was in college when Apollo 7 flew and recall the squabbles with controllers on the ground. To be fair, Schirra had a cold, a famous one that he...

Bohdan Paczynski, the Princeton astrophysicist who died April 19, was a major contributor to the exoplanet hunt, fine-tuning the techniques used in gravitational microlensing. Coming to Princeton in 1982 after twenty years at Warsaw's Copernicus Astronomical Center, Paczynski understood early on that the bending of light by foreground objects, predicted by Einstein, could be applied to surveying stars in our own galaxy. A star passing directly in front of another can focus the light from the background star, producing a natural lens that allows investigation of objects otherwise impossible to observe. The consortium of scientists that Paczynski led would go on to found the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE), now active at Chile's Las Campanas Observatory. Says Michael Strauss, a professor of astrophysical sciences and a colleague of Paczynski's: "The next thing Bohdan realized was that when you observe lensing that often, you can do other clever things, such as use it to...

Having had time to decompress from their exhausting Asian trip, Gregory and Elisabeth Benford have revised and enlarged the account of their travels that Centauri Dreams published in late March. The text contains numerous additional insights, but what makes this revision truly stand out from the original post are the photographs, fully seven times the number first published, each illustrating a unique facet of their journey. I've inserted the new Asia Emerging in the archives. Don't miss its unforgettable images and insights into a part of the world that will have much to say about our future on this planet. I told Gregory that my favorite photograph is the one of him at the Raffles Hotel in Singapore, Singapore Sling in hand. Shades of Somerset Maugham...

Philosophia Naturalis #9 has just become available, with numerous links to stories on the Gliese 581 c discovery and intriguing looks at everything from quantum mechanics to gamma ray bursts. Nobody can keep up with all the weblogs out there, which is why a blog 'carnival' like this one is must reading to see how the latest findings play among scientists and laymen alike (this is where I discovered Clifford's Johnson's Asymptotia, itself a sufficient reason to keep reading in hopes of future finds). Hosted this month by Science and Reason, the carnival moves from site to site with each new edition, none of which are to be missed.

Exoplanets are a niche topic for many people, rarely brought to mind except to note an occasional discovery before moving on to the rest of the day's news. But Gliese 581 c is causing ripples. Yesterday, BBC radio host Eddie Mair referred to it as 'the planet everyone is talking about.' And last night on my regular walk I passed a neighbor I run into almost every evening. He was standing in his yard looking west under a sky dominated by an incredibly bright Venus. This is a man I have known for years, and not once in that time have we spoken about astronomy. But on this night, he said "So how do you pronounce G-l-i-e-s-e?" I've always said 'Glee-see,' but as astronomer Wilhelm Gliese was German, the proper way to say it really should be 'Glee-zuh'. Gliese (1915-1993) first came to my attention about twenty years ago when I was trying to work out the odds of picking up accidental radio emissions from civilizations near the Sun. The Gliese Catalog of Nearby Stars told me what was...

Centauri Dreams has always admired gutsy women. Dorritt Hoffleit was one of the gutsiest. She spent nearly fifty years at Yale University teaching, doing research and continuing to work in her office into her 90's. She may have been the world's oldest active astronomer when she died on April 9 at age 100. Here's a bit from the Boston Globe's obituary: As the author of the Yale Bright Star Catalogue, she tracked stars across the sky and published their locations. In her spare time, she studied variable stars, stars that vary in brightness with time, and taught young female astronomy students on Nantucket every summer. Awards and honors began to pile up. She was awarded the George Van Biesbroeck Prize in 1988 for dedication to astronomy and five years later the American Astronomical Society awarded her the Annenberg Prize for science education. That same year, she was inducted into the Connecticut Women's Hall of Fame. And still, though she had officially retired at age 68 in 1975, she...

April 12 is a memorable date, the anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's 108-minute orbital flight in 1961. It's also the date, some twenty years later, when NASA launched Columbia, the first Space Shuttle (and boy do I remember the trepidation of watching that one go up). Celebrating these milestones is Yuri's Night, marked by 119 parties scheduled in 32 countries on six continents. Check the celebration site for parties near you. And for stay-at-homes, be aware that Second Life is hosting one of the venues online. Thanks to Frank Taylor for the tip on this. And note (via Larry Klaes) David S. F. Portree's fine tribute to Gagarin's accomplishment. Nice cover of an early 1930's Science Wonder Stories on the same page. Somewhere Hugo Gernsback is smiling...

Could a cloud of two-foot wide sunshades 60,000 miles long save the Earth from a global warming emergency? Roger Angel (Steward Observatory, University of Arizona) has been studying the idea of making the spacecraft out of micron-thick glass weighing one gram per sunshade. That's the weight of a butterfly for each unit, but we're talking about trillions of them out at the L1 Lagrangian point, an almost fixed zone in relation to Earth whose mild orbital instability can be overcome by onboard intelligence. Total sunshade mass: 20 million tons. This article in the Arizona Daily Wildcat has more on the improbable concept and what Angel is doing today: One of the big problems for the project is getting the total mass of all the sunshades into space...so Angel came up with using electromagnetic force to propel the spacecraft up a two-kilometer launch tube. The launch tube would have a series of electrical coils that propel the rocket until it accelerates to escape velocity, about 25,000...

Back in the 1980's, I was active as a shortwave listener. I was, in radio jargon, an SWL and not a ham, meaning I only listened and didn't transmit. It was great fun to tune in distant stations, and the more challenging the better, which is why the Falkland Islands were always high on the list (I never received their station), and Tristan da Cunha was the ultimate catch (all but impossible here on the US east coast). It wasn't long before I drifted into utility DXing, listening for non-broadcast stations in remote places, everything from low-frequency aviation beacons to ship-to-shore communications, and I got a kick out of monitoring radiotelephone traffic from places like Little America (Antarctica) back to the States. Finally my interests converged and I started thinking about the ultimate DX -- receiving a signal from the stars. SETI efforts were in their early days then, but I began to wonder whether an amateur receiving rig could hope to snag some kind of extraterrestrial...

John Updike reviews Walter Isaacson's new biography of Einstein in The New Yorker, from which this excerpt on why a job in the Swiss patent office was actually a good thing for the young genius: "Had he been consigned instead to the job of an assistant to a professor," Isaacson points out, "he might have felt compelled to churn out safe publications and be overly cautious in challenging accepted notions." Special relativity has a flavor of the patent office; one of the theory's charms for the fascinated public was the practical apparatus of its exposition, involving down-to-earth images like passing trains equipped with reflecting mirrors on their ceilings, and measuring rods that magically shrink with speed from the standpoint of a stationary observer, and clocks that slow as they accelerate — counterintuitive effects graspable with little more math than plane geometry. Einstein would later say, upon taking his first professorship (at Zurich), that in doing so he had become...

Centauri Dreams believes profoundly in what I might call 'realistic optimism.' While an aggressive belief in the human future can be overstated, it's important to remember that intellectual fashions come and go, leaving many a futurist trying to explain another failed prediction. The view here is that the vast problems that face our species are solvable through common sense and technology, and that somehow we will engage our tools to get us off-planet before we annihilate ourselves. Playing into this notion is the work of David Haussler, cited recently by Freeman Dyson as one reason for his own deeply optimistic view of the future. Studying the human genome, Haussler and team at UC Santa Cruz discovered a section of DNA called Human Accelerated Region 1. HAR1 evidently shows up in the genomes of a wide range of species, from mouse to chicken to chimpanzee. It was apparently unchanged for about three hundred million years, as Dyson told Benny Peiser in a recent interview (see this New...

by Gregory & Elisabeth Benford We left February 17, 2007 on a considerable, month-long trip, starting with Hong Kong, where we caught the Lunar New Year Celebration (Chinese New Year). Then on to Colombo, Sri Lanka, to visit Arthur Clarke. Arthur has post polio syndrome and thus very little memory or energy. He turns 90 this December and wants to keep in touch with the outer world, mostly through the Internet. He has few friends left in Colombo. Arthur took us to the Swimming Club for lunch, a sunny ocean club left over from the British days (commonly called the Raj). Members swam in the pool and enjoyed buffet lunch. It felt somehow right to watch the Indian Ocean curl in, breaking on the rocks, and speak of space: the last, greatest ocean. Image: Elisabeth, Arthur C. Clarke, and Greg in ACC's home study in Colombo. Our hotel with a similar ocean view, the Galle Face, is the oldest grand Raj hotel east of the Suez Canal, dating from before the Civil War, and reeks of atmosphere. On...