by Gregory Benford Centauri Dreams is pleased to present the travels of Gregory Benford, just returned from a multi-week journey that took him to Sri Lanka to see Arthur C. Clarke, around the southern Indian coast all the way to Bombay, thence to Jaipur, Delhi and finally on to Singapore. The well-known physicist and science fiction author portrays lands awash in history but laden with potential for a possible future off-planet. Will a China/India space race revitalize manned spacecraft technologies? Enjoy the journey and be sure to check the Benford & Rose site for the author's recent essays and commentaries. We left February 17, 2007 on a considerable, month-long trip, starting with Hong Kong. We caught the Lunar Celebration at Chinese New Year—huge crowds, spectacular fireworks. Then on to Colombo, Sri Lanka, to visit Arthur C. 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...

I've been waiting for something official re the reported closing of NASA's Institute for Advanced Concepts, but now that New Scientist is confirming the story that Keith Cowing at NASAWatch broke earlier this morning, I think it's time to comment on this grim development. NASA will save $4 million in its annual budget by closing NIAC. That means closing a program that regularly sought ideas from people outside the agency, funded them in a first round to see if they held promise, and offered more substantial second round funding to advance the best of them still further. Institute director Robert Cassanova has championed innovative ideas in propulsion, robotics, spacesuit design and more. In fact, NIAC-funded studies are so rich that browsing through this material could give science fiction authors ideas for years. I'll add that Cassanova's enthusiasm for the work was communicable. He was a great help when I was gathering NIAC material for Centauri Dreams (the book), and although he...

When you think about it, so much of science involves putting our instruments into the right place at the right time. The transit of Venus across the Sun in 1769 was an opportunity to use triangulation from opposite sides of the Earth to calculate the distance to the Sun more accurately. That effort took James Cook to Tahiti, and though the experiment failed, it remains an inspiring example of the human intellect trying to solve questions by exploration, determination and hard work. We saw yesterday that if we put instruments into much further places, we may be able to identify oceanic worlds and perhaps map their continents. Peter McCullough (Space Telescope Science Institute) wrote the most recent paper on this concept and presented it at a conference on missions that could be enabled by a return to the Moon. But the Moon itself may not be the best venue for the instruments in question, as McCullough noted in an e-mail after reading yesterday's entry: "I might comment (in...

When and if we discover extraterrestrial life, the handling of the news will be interesting. Recall the tumultuous media circus following the announcement in the movie Contact. Carl Sagan knew a little about dealing with the press, and the film version gets across what might happen when you start broadcasting public fear and fascination through a cable TV and Net-connected world. Or think of the recent rumblings when the SETI Institute said it was about to make a 'major announcement,' which turned out to be business related and not extraterrestrial at all. And in point of fact, we do have one actual experience of trying to announce extraterrestrial life. That was in 1996, when a team of researchers had submitted a paper, subsequently accepted, to Science. The contents were dynamite, for the authors proposed that the Antarctic meteorite ALH84001 might be evidence of life on Mars. The team had studied four potential biomarkers within the meteorite, which had earlier been determined to...

Back in the 1950's, science fiction magazines were all over the newsstands. That's significant for Centauri Dreams' purposes because these titles spurred many a career in science and a fascination with astronomy, astrophysics and engineering. Many is the scientist I've talked to who fondly reminisces about stories that proved inspirational, and in today's math-challenged world, getting students to start thinking about pursuing work in physics or other sciences is a serious concern. Which is one reason Paul Raven's recent essay on the declining fortunes of the science fiction magazines caught my eye. Paul writes Velcro City Tourist Board, the site I turn to when I want to know what's worth reading on the modern SF scene. He's well plugged in -- Paul writes reviews for Interzone, the fine British magazine, among other things -- and for those of us whose SF tastes run to older material, he provides a wonderful way of keeping up with new trends and making sense out of where the field is...

The seventh iteration of Philosophia Naturalis is now online at geek counterpoint. These 'blog carnivals' are increasingly helpful because they cluster articles of interest, and I always wind up learning about new things to read. This carnival's find is Rob Knop (Vanderbilt), whose Galactic Interactions blog offers an intriguing entry on what he calls 'The Greatest Mystery in All of Physics," which turns out to be the link between gravitational and inertial mass. Another find: Cosmic Variance's take on relativity and why E=mc2. Which gets us into a thought experiment: Think of a physicist, standing at one side of a large box, which itself is sitting on a perfectly frictionless surface (think of ice if you like). The physicist possesses a large cannon, which she is using to hurl heavy cannonballs across the box. What happens to the whole system? The answer is informative and entertaining, particularly when you replace the cannon with a powerful laser. Read the rest at the site, and...

Star Trek technology will be the subject of two upcoming shows on the History Channel, with at least one segment devoted to the interstellar warp drive and the possibility of making it real. The Tau Zero Foundation's Marc Millis will make an appearance in the context of his work on advanced propulsion for NASA. Star Trek Tech is to air on February 18th, with Star Trek: Beyond The Final Frontier following on the 19th. Click here for Dr. Millis' background statement on the Tau Zero Foundation. For more, have a look at Centauri Dreams' archive of Foundation coverage.

When Vernor Vinge takes on the topic "What if the Singularity Does NOT Happen," interesting things are bound to follow. Thus his talk for the Long Now Foundation-sponsored Seminars About Long-Term Thinking yesterday. Vinge, a computer scientist and science fiction author, is not giving up his belief that the Singularity will happen. That event, which he believes will take place in the next few decades, should happen suddenly and be transformative in its effect. Here's how Vinge himself describes the Singularity in an online precis of the material he used in his presentation: It seems plausible that with technology we can, in the fairly near future, create (or become) creatures who surpass humans in every intellectual and creative dimension. Events beyond this event -- call it the Technological Singularity -- are as unimaginable to us as opera is to a flatworm. Vinge's ideas on the Singularity date back to the 1980s; he refined his thoughts on it in a 1993 essay called "The Coming...

Centauri Dreams has little use for pessimism. The operative assumption in these precincts is that humanity will muddle through somehow and eventually get to the stars, whether in a matter of centuries or millennia. But it's always good to have a backup plan in the event of catastrophe, which is what the Norwegian government has been working on. Who knows when some rogue asteroid like 99942 Apophis may beat the odds and fall, with shattering results, to Earth? The Svalbard International Seed Vault has the aim of protecting the world's agriculture in a vast seed bank, one that would house three million seed samples. Collecting and maintaining the seeds is the Global Crop Diversity Trust, whose executive director, Cary Fowler, likened the vault to a safety net in a recent BBC story, saying "Can you imagine an effective, efficient, sustainable response to climate change, water shortages, food security issues without what is going to go in the vault - it is the raw material of...

It's hard to believe that Sir Patrick Moore started his astronomy program The Sky at Night fifty years ago. Since then, BBC viewers have known where to turn for a view of things celestial, one with that particular Moore mix of savvy and amiable, eccentric enthusiasm that comes across so well in his many books. So what a pleasure to see that a set of stamps has now gone on sale honoring his work. How else would you see interstellar scenery on an postal envelope? A news account in the Telegraph quotes Sir Patrick thus: "I feel deeply honoured. I would like to think that we have played a part in introducing astronomy to people who would otherwise have paid no real attention to the heavens. Many years hence, philatelists will still be admiring these stamps paying tribute, not to me, but to The Sky At Night." Can you imagine a show running for fifty years with the same host? I hate to disagree with the gentleman, having grown up reading his books, but the tribute future stamp admirers pay...

Centennaries are worth celebrating, especially when they involve people whose work advanced our understanding of reality. A big one comes up in 2008, about which this clue: "The views of space and time which I wish to lay before you have sprung from the soil of experimental physics, and therein lies their strength. They are radical. Henceforth space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality." The speaker is Hermann Minkowski (1864-1909), the German scientist and mathematician who didn't survive the 1908 presentation he began with these words by more than a few months (he died of appendicitis the following January). The talk, entitled Raum und Zeit, contains Minkowski's view that time and space must be understood together as a four dimensional concept called spacetime. That idea played a material role in furthering Einstein's later development of General Relativity. Indeed,...

Centauri Dreams has no idea how you quantify something as elusive as imagination, but if anyone should have a go at it, that man is Arthur C. Clarke. Thus the interesting news of the center being established in his name in Las Vegas. Its goal: "...to investigate the reach and impact of human imagination." The Clarke Foundation hopes to raise $70 million for the project, which Clarke says aims to "...accord imagination as much regard as high academic grades in the classroom - anywhere in the world." Exactly how this is done will be fascinating to see. It's good to learn that Sir Arthur's health is on the mend, and to hear him in this recent message on KurzweilAI.net talking about a rejuvenated space program: Notwithstanding the remarkable accomplishments during the past 50 years, I believe that the Golden Age of space travel is still ahead of us. Before the current decade is out, fee-paying passengers will be experiencing sub-orbital flights aboard privately funded passenger vehicles,...

The Astroprof's Page takes a look at the interesting star Gliese 710, a K7 dwarf with a particular claim to distinction: it's headed in the direction of our Sun at about 24 kilometers per second. Give it 1.4 million years and the star will have closed to within a light year of Sol, shining at a magnitude of 1.2 and disturbing the icy debris out in the Oort Cloud. A rain of comets moving into the inner system is the probable result. Barnard's Star is moving towards us too, closing to within four light years around 10000 AD, but we needn't wait for a close stellar pass to start worrying about catastrophic collisions. As the battered surface of the Moon suggests, the Solar System can be a hostile place, making a space-based infrastructure to prevent future disaster an imperative.

Some years back, the fine space writer William E. Burrows helped to establish ARC, the Alliance to Rescue Civilization. ARC's purpose was to create an imperishable archive that would contain a record of our civilization in the event of catastrophe. Now a part of the Lifeboat Foundation, ARC envisioned making a 'backup' of the human experience, with the Moon as just one venue. In today's Wall Street Journal, Burrows looks at the dangers of returning to the Moon vs. staying home: It is therefore reasonable to ask whether such an incredibly expensive and dangerous undertaking is worth it. The answer is an unequivocal yes. But the truly compelling reason to build a lunar base is not for adventure, though there will be plenty of that. Nor is it to mine resources to gain riches, though that will eventually happen. The overriding reason to establish a colony on the moon is humanity's survival: Darwin achieves liftoff. Do we really need the current space station? Burrows says no -- we...

The sixth edition of Philosophia Naturalis is out, published by Charles Daney on his Science and Reason blog. It's a 'carnival' of interesting writing in the weblog format, pointing to writing by diverse and sundry authors on the physical sciences and technology. Carnivals like this one seem to be gaining popularity, a welcome thing because they offer pointers to sites I hadn't known about, and the topics are always interesting. Good coverage of the American Astronomical Society meeting shows up here, along with work on dark matter, the Antikythera Mechanism, and a wonderful explanation of light cones and Einsteinian relativity. I'm pleased that Philosophia Naturalis includes two recent posts on the James Webb Space Telescope from these pages.

A relativistic trip to Barnard's Star? Those who read French will want to check out the log of such a journey as Philippe Guglielmetti sees it. Traveling at a constant 1g for acceleration and braking, the mission reaches 0.99999 c, travel time twelve years but only three as experienced by the crew. The fictionalized journey plays fast and loose with the star itself, as Adam Crowl notes in a comment below, but the trip is fun even with my rusty French. Have a look.