Regular Acceptance: Abstracts Due June 30, 2021 The Interstellar Research Group (IRG) hereby invites participation in its 7th Interstellar Symposium, hosted by the University of Arizona to be held from Friday, September 24 through Monday, September 27, 2021, in Tucson, Arizona. The Interstellar Symposium has the following elements: The Interstellar Symposium focuses on all aspects of interstellar travel (human and robotic), including power, communications, system reliability/maintainability, psychology, crew health, anthropology, legal regimes and treaties, ethics, and propulsion with an emphasis on possible destinations (including the status of exoplanet research), life support systems, and habitats. Working Tracks are collaborative, small group discussions around a set of interdisciplinary questions on an interstellar subject with the objective of producing "roadmaps" and/or publications to encourage further developments in the respective topics. This year we will be organizing the...

Breakthrough Discuss 2021 wraps up today, with presentations on mission concepts to Alpha Centauri, lightsail technologies and fusion propulsion. Of particular interest to me, in light of the magnitude of the problem as it affects the Breakthrough Starshot idea, is a session on the current state of deep space optical communications. This has been a lively and robust meeting -- James Cameron's appearance was particularly engaging, as was the Yuri's Night panel discussion -- and the public is invited to watch again today at https://www.youtube.com/breakthroughprize. Gathering my notes is going to be time-consuming, but many of these presentations will make their way into upcoming discussions on Centauri Dreams. In light of the wide-ranging discussion on the Centauri stars and the challenge they present, it seems appropriate to introduce a quote I just ran into from Alan Lightman's new book Probable Impossibilities (Pantheon, 2021). This is from a section talking about quantum...

The ‘Big Whack,’ as I’ve heard it called, is the impact of a planetary embryo of perhaps Mars-size (or larger) that is thought to have struck the Earth during the latter era of planet formation. Or we can call it the ‘Giant Impact,’ as Arizona State scientists did in a presentation at the virtual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference recently concluded. Whatever the name, the event offers a model for the formation of the Moon, one that explains the latter’s small iron core and the anomalous high degree of angular momentum of the Earth-Moon system. The impact of the protoplanet called Theia would have been a fearsome thing, blasting pieces of both worlds into space that later coalesced into the Moon. Think When Worlds Collide, the 1933 science fiction novel written by Philip Wylie and Edwin Balmer, whose cover is irresistible and thus must be reproduced here. Better known, of course, is the 1951 film of the same name, produced by George Pal. Neither has anything to do with the Moon...

How do we go about crafting a spacefaring civilization? Nick Nielsen has been exploring the issues involved in terms of the choices cultures make and their conception of their future. Change the society and you change the outcome, with huge ramifications for our potential growth off-planet and on. The history of so-called 'futurism' tells us that visions of human potential differ according to the desirability (or lack of it) of deploying resources to space research, and it is a telling fact that many analyses extant today leave space out of the equation altogether. Have a look, then, at possible civilizations, their outcomes dictated by the assumptions they draw on as they attempt to pass through a bottleneck defined by a planetary society negotiating its relationship with the cosmos. by J. N. Nielsen 1. Space Infrastructure Architectures 2. The Problems of Futurism 3. Beyond Institutionalized Futurism 4. Futurism at the Scale of Civilization 5. Six Possible Civilizations 5a. Space...

Interesting things happen to stars after they've left the main sequence. So-called Asymptotic Giant Branch (AGB) stars are those less than nine times the mass of the Sun that have already moved through their red giant phase. They're burning an inner layer of helium and an outer layer of hydrogen, multiple zones surrounding an inert carbon-oxygen core. Some of these stars, cooling and expanding, begin to condense dust in their outer envelopes and to pulsate, producing a 'wind' off the surface of the star that effectively brings an end to hydrogen burning. Image: Hubble image of the asymptotic giant branch star U Camelopardalis. This star, nearing the end of its life, is losing mass as it coughs out shells of gas. Credit: ESA/Hubble, NASA and H. Olofsson (Onsala Space Observatory). We're on the way to a planetary nebula centered on a white dwarf now, but along the way, in this short pre-planetary nebula phase, we have the potential for interesting things to happen. It's a potential...

I'm tracking an online petition conceived by Jorge Santiago Ortiz that challenges the National Science Foundation: Repair the Arecibo Observatory, do not decommission it. Given Friday's news of the planned shutdown due to problems with support cables and the dangers of possible repairs, it's good to see an effort being made to explore the possible. Ortiz points out that the observatory employs more than 120 people, is visited by some 200 scientists every year working on research projects, and draws 100,000 visitors yearly from the general population. I notice the petition is approaching 6,000 signatures this morning as people react to the Arecibo news. It is possible there is a path toward keeping the observatory alive? Also noted by Centauri Dreams reader Jeff Brandt, himself a resident of Puerto Rico, is an attempt to free the facility from National Science Foundation funding and repair the structure. Brandt notes that Jenniffer González-Colón, Puerto Rico's representative...

I always wanted to get to Arecibo, the magnificent 305-meter telescope that has for so long been a locus for radio astronomy research, but I was never able to make it to Puerto Rico. Now I've run out of time. The National Science Foundation doesn't make these decisions lightly but multiple engineering companies have delivered assessments that point to catastrophic failure of the telescope structure as a real possibility. Too dangerous to repair, and faced with stability issues even if it could be repaired, the Arecibo Observatory will be decommissioned. The breakdown in the vast structure has been ongoing, bits and pieces of news that added further dismay to an already dismal 2020. A support cable detached in August, resulting in an evaluation from the University of Central Florida, which manages the site. Replacement auxiliary cables were then on the way, temporary cables available, but on November 6 another main cable broke. The stresses on the second cable evidently told the...

You wouldn't think that a place 100 times drier than the Sahara desert would have a lot to offer, but when that place is the sunlit surface of the Moon, the import of the new discovery from the SOFIA airborne observatory is clear. H2O in Clavius Crater, in concentrations of 100 to 412 parts per million, is said by NASA to be equivalent to a 12-ounce bottle of water trapped in a cubic meter of soil spread across the lunar surface. The results in Nature Astronomy point to interesting possibilities for future missions if the water is accessible. Exactly what would be involved in extracting such a resource? While we try to figure that out, where the water comes from is an interesting question. Thus Casey Honniball (NASA GSFC), lead author on the SOFIA paper: "Without a thick atmosphere, water on the sunlit lunar surface should just be lost to space. Yet somehow we're seeing it. Something is generating the water, and something must be trapping it there." We also have Paul Hayne and team's...

Peter Coles, who is a professor of theoretical physics at Maynooth University in Ireland, tells an anecdote about John Barrow, who died recently at the age of 67. Barrow had been Coles' thesis supervisor and a profound influence on his work as well as a good friend. As Coles tells it in his In the Dark blog, Barrow had an engaging and sometimes slightly morbid sense of humor, dry enough to tease out the ironies abundant in life's accomplishments. Thus his reaction to being made a Fellow of the Royal Society, which was to point out in an email that his joy was tempered by having received as his first communication from the Society not only a fat bill for his subscription, but also a form upon which to enter the details of his future obituary. How saddening that Barrow's obituary materials had to be put to use so soon. The man was 67, felled by cancer. As Coles notes, he was "one of cosmology's brightest lights." I can glance across my office to the nearest of many bookshelves where I...

While we often discuss expansion into the Solar System as a step leading to interstellar flight, the movement into space has its dark side, as author Daniel Deudney argues in a new book. As Kenneth Roy points out in the review that follows, it behooves everyone involved in space studies to understand what the counter-arguments are. Ken is a newly retired professional engineer who is currently living amidst, as he puts it, "the relics of the Manhattan Project in Oak Ridge, Tennessee." His professional career involved working for various Department of Energy (DOE) contractors in the fields of fire protection and nuclear safety. As a long-time hobby, he has been working with the idea of terraforming, which he extended to the invention of the "Shell Worlds" concept as a way to terraform planets and large moons well outside a star's 'Goldilocks' zone [see Terraforming: Enter the Shell World]. In 1997, Ken made the cover of the prestigious Proceedings of the U.S. Naval Institute for his...

Is there a single technology that can take us from being capable of reaching space to actually building an infrastructure system-wide? Or at least getting to a tipping point that makes the latter possible, one that Nick Nielsen, in today's essay, refers to as a 'space breakout'? We can think of game-changing devices like the printing press with Gutenberg's movable type, or James Watt's steam engine, as altering — even creating — the shape and texture of their times. The issue for space enthusiasts is how our times might be similarly altered. Nick here follows up an earlier investigation of spacefaring mythologies with this look at indispensable technologies, forcing the question of whether there are such, or whether technologies necessarily come in clusters that enforce each other's effects. The more topical question: What is holding back a spacefaring future that after the Apollo landings had seemed all but certain? Nielsen, a frequent author in these pages, is a...

In Shakespeare's famous lines from The Tempest, the spirit Ariel addresses Ferdinand, prince of Naples, now grieving over the death of his father in the shipwreck that has brought them to a remote island in an earlier era of exploration. The lines have an eerie punch given our discussion of the changes humanity may bring upon itself as we adapt to deep space: Full fathom five thy father lies; Of his bones are coral made; Those are pearls that were his eyes; Nothing of him that doth fade, But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange... From this has emerged the modern shadings on 'sea-change,' yet another Shakespearean coinage that has enriched the language. I thought about The Tempest while reading through the Working Track Report from TVIW 2016, a symposium in which these adaptations took center stage. The new edition of Stellaris: People of the Stars (Baen, 2020), discussed last Friday, contains the short report, prompting this examination of its conclusions along...

In the sixteen years I've been writing Centauri Dreams, I've often used written science fiction to illustrate points about our ongoing science discussions. This also gives me a chance to poke around in my collection of old SF magazines, always a pleasure, as I've been collecting them since i was a boy and they go back to the glory days of newsstand fiction, which extended well beyond SF to mysteries, westerns and the various other genres defined by the pulp magazines of the early 20th Century. What a kick, then, to read a short story by Robert E. Hampson and find a starship named Centauri Dreams! Not only that, but Robert, a professor of physiology and pharmacology at Wake Forest School of Medicine, gives me a nod by naming the orbital hub through which travelers pass in the story 'Gilster Station.' Thank you, Robert! The story is "Those Left Behind," which appears in the collection Stellaris: People of the Stars, a volume Hampson edited with Les Johnson. First published in 2019, the...

I've never known anyone as passionate about science fiction movies as Larry Klaes. His features on films ranging from The Thing from Another World to 2014's Interstellar have proven hugely popular. Today Larry looks at Peter Hyams' 2010: The Year We Make Contact, a film with (and this is putting it mildly) big shoes to fill. How did 2010 measure up to its illustrious predecessor, and what choices did Hyams make that confirmed -- or contradicted -- Stanley Kubrick's vision in 2001: A Space Odyssey? Have a look at what Larry considers a flawed but nonetheless valuable take on Arthur C. Clarke's angle on the cosmos, complete with numerous pointers to online nuggets that fill out the story of the film's production. by Larry Klaes When the science fiction film 2001: A Space Odyssey premiered in theaters in early April of 1968, it created a stir with cinema-goers and critics which has seldom been seen before or since. An experimental art film with an unheard-of budget for its day – 10.5...

It doesn’t take much to awaken my internal medievalist. On this score, Andreas Hein’s latest is made to order, looking at European cathedrals, long-term projects and starships. Is there an analogy that impacts long-term thinking here, or is the comparison too strained to be useful? Andreas is the Executive Director and Director Technical Programs of the UK-based not-for-profit Initiative for Interstellar Studies (i4is), where he is coordinating and contributing to research on diverse topics such as missions to interstellar objects, laser sail probes, self-replicating spacecraft, and world ships. He is also an assistant professor of systems engineering at CentraleSupélec – Université Paris-Saclay. Dr. Hein obtained his Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in aerospace engineering from the Technical University of Munich and conducted his PhD research on heritage technologies in space programs there and at MIT. He is an INCOSE member, a Fellow of the British Interplanetary Society, and a...

The pandemic has everyone's attention, but it's not too early to ask what lessons might be learned from public response to it. In particular, are there nuggets of insight here into what might occur with another sudden and startling event, the reception of a signal from another civilization? John Traphagan takes a look at the question in today's essay. Dr. Traphagan is a social anthropologist and Professor of Religious Studies, in the Program in Human Dimensions of Organizations, and Mitsubishi Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin. He also holds a visiting professorship at Waseda University in Tokyo, as well as being a board member of SSoCIA, the Society for Social and Conceptual Issues in Astrobiology. His research focuses on the relationship between science and culture and falls into two streams: life in rural Japan and the culture and ethics of space exploration. John has published numerous scientific papers and several books, including Science, Culture, and the Search for...

Al Jackson is back this morning with an essay examining another old friend, the 1950 film Destination Moon. Talk about fond memories! I first encountered the movie at a birthday party for a bunch of unruly 4th graders, finding the birthday boy absorbed in watching the spaceship Luna enroute to the Moon in an upstairs room while the party went on below. I stayed right there until his mother came up to scold him and bring us both back down to eat cake, dying to know what happened. Since then I've enjoyed the film numerous times, especially appreciating the Woody Woodpecker teaching sequence and the ingenious solution to the crew's problems getting everyone back home. A veteran of the Apollo days and a science fiction fan with encyclopedic knowledge of the field, Dr. Jackson gives us a look at how the film was made and illuminates Robert Heinlein's connections to the project. Time to pull out my DVD for another look. by Albert A Jackson I was two weeks away from age 7 in October 1947...

I had never considered the possibilities for life on Uranus until I read Geoffrey Landis' story "Into the Blue Abyss," which first ran in Asimov's in 1999, and later became a part of his collection Impact Parameter. Landis' characters looked past the lifeless upper clouds of the 7th planet to go deep into warm, dark Uranian oceans, his protagonist a submersible pilot and physicist set to explore: Below the clouds, way below, was an ocean of liquid water. Uranus was the true water-world of the solar system, a sphere of water surrounded by a thick atmosphere. Unlike the other planets, Uranus has a rocky core too small to measure, or perhaps no solid core at all, but only ocean, an ocean that has actually dissolved the silicate core of the planet away, a bottomless ocean of liquid water twenty thousand kilometers deep. It would be churlish to give away what turns up in this ocean, so I'm going to direct you to the story itself, now available for free in a new anthology edited by Julie...

Freeman Dyson's response to the perplexity of our existence was not purely scientific. A polymath by nature, he responded deeply to art and literature and often framed life's dilemmas through their lens. Always thinking of himself as a mathematician first, he unified quantum electrodynamics and saw the Nobel Prize go to the three who had formulated, in different ways, its structure, but he would cast himself as the Ben Jonson to Richard Feynman's Shakespeare, a fact noted by Gregory Benford in his review of Phillip F. Schewe's recent biography. That would be a typical allusion for a man whose restless intellect chafed at smug over-specialization, something neither he nor Feynman could ever be accused of. Feynman, Julian Schwinger and Shinichiro Tomonaga each came up with ways to describe how electrons and photons interrelate, but it was Dyson, on one of his long cross-continental bus trips, who worked out the equivalence of their theories, giving us QED. He would publish the unifying...

The 30th anniversary of the famous 'Pale Blue Dot' image of Earth, which took place on February 14, is an appropriate occasion for the newly updated image below, which brings the latest methods to bear on the data Voyager 1 presented us. Our planet takes up less than a single pixel and for that reason is not fully resolved. The rays of sunlight due to scattering within the camera optics intersect with Earth, reminding us that from Voyager's position 6 billion kilometers from home, the Earth/Sun separation was only a matter of a few degrees. Image: For the 30th anniversary of one of the most iconic images taken by NASA's Voyager mission, a new version of the image known as "the Pale Blue Dot." Planet Earth is visible as a bright speck within the sunbeam just right of center and appears softly blue, as in the original version published in 1990. This updated version uses modern image-processing software and techniques to revisit the well-known Voyager view while attempting to respect...