"...in the historical perspective, the seafaring nations of Europe grew mighty from the wealth returned from the discovery and settlement of the new world. Those societies who stayed home languished, those who embraced the unknown prospered. Seen broadly, we're a species which owes its current success to exploration. Exploration generates opportunities which lead to economic strength, and exploration yields situational awareness which creates survival options. It contributes directly to our survival, not by giving us a second home if we screw this one up - I think that's kind of a lame argument - but by giving us interplanetary technical capability which will allow us to police and secure our own backyard, the solar system. It might possibly give us the means to deliver ourselves from destruction in this cosmic shooting gallery. "Right now if we discovered a comet nucleus or an asteroid on impact course with Earth, we could do exactly what the dinosaurs did, and we could stare upward...

"The space effort is very simply a continuation of the expansion of ecological range, which has been occurring at an accelerating rate throughout the evolutionary history of Man... Successful extraterrestrial colonization, for example, might be counted as an evolutionary 'success,' and unsuccessful colonization--abandonment of the space effort--as an evolutionary 'failure...' Space exploration should be considered primarily as a biological thrust outward for the human species, and not just another step toward making life easier through a speedup in technology." Ward J. Haas, "The Biological Significance of the Space Effort", Annals of the New York Academy of Science, Vol. 140 (1966), pp. 659-666. First noted in Sylvia Engdahl's Space Quotes to Ponder pages. Centauri Dreams note: The attempt to defend space exploration on the grounds of near-term technological benefits, though well-meaning, has always betrayed a lack of imagination. The human movement into space only makes sense when...

"Sooner or later for good or ill, a united mankind, equipped with science and power, will probably turn its attention to the other planets, not only for economic exploitation, but also as possible homes for man... The goal for the solar system would seem to be that it should become an interplanetary community of very diverse worlds ... each contributing to the common experience its characteristic view of the universe. Through the pooling of this wealth of experience, through this "commonwealth of worlds," new levels of mental and spiritual development should become possible, levels at present quite inconceivable to man." -- Olaf Stapledon, in a 1948 address to the British Interplanetary Society. Centauri Dreams note: Both C. S. Lewis and Arthur C. Clarke have acknowledged their debt to Stapledon, the British philosopher and science fiction writer whose Last and First Men (1930) and Starmaker (1937) project the human story forward into the remotest of futures. For myth-making,...

"The existence of plausible fastship concepts suggest[s] that once the available technology base has grown sufficiently large, small bands of explorers and pioneers will make the leap between stellar oases. How large the movement of people might be depends, of course, on the cost. If fastship voyages require a significant fraction of the total human wealth, they will be few and far between. We can estimate the relative cost. The sun outputs enough energy to permit 50,000 emigrants to leave the Solar System each second (if that were the only use of the gathered sunlight). If, by the time humanity is ready for the interstellar adventure, our descendants have managed to tap even a modest fraction of the solar output, they could easily afford emigration at a rate sufficient to sustain the human expansion. If we take the figure of 500 men, women, and children, a number suggested by studies of breeding populations among surviving hunter and gatherer peoples, as the minimum size of a...

Huygens is now safely on its way. More on this, and on Cassini's post-separation course correction, next week. Until then, best wishes for the holidays, along with a thought from Arthur C. Clarke's Interplanetary Flight: An Introduction to Astronautics (London: Temple Press Limited, 1960): There is no way back into the past; the choice, as Wells once said, is the universe--or nothing. Though men and civilizations may yearn for rest, for the dream of the lotus-eaters, that is a desire that merges imperceptibly into death. The challenge of the great spaces between the worlds is a stupendous one; but if we fail to meet it, the story of our race will be drawing to its close.

"We hesitate about where to go from here in space. Yet our delay in exploiting this window of opportunity could close off choices for our descendants if the no-growth paradigm--or a failure of nerve--should come to dominate the industrial nations... Because of our technologies, and the scales of our political and economic organizations, we now have the option of taking a conscious evolutionary step, expanding the presence and influence of humanity beyond the biosphere that evolved us--and possibly beyond the limits that otherwise would constrain our future... Our generation is the first to have this choice. It may be up to us to prove that intelligence armed with technology has long-term survival value." -- Michael Michaud in Life in the Universe (AAAS Selected Symposium 31, 1979). Found in the online repository Space Quotes to Ponder.

Every technology appears in a context, meaning there is a cultural dimension to our creations that will shape and, in turn, be shaped by them. Centauri Dreams occasionally looks at stories, novels and films that have shaped our idea of interstellar flight. Today it's "Out Around Rigel," by Robert H. Wilson, which ran in the December, 1931 issue of Astounding Stories. To my knowledge, Wilson published only one science fiction story, but in its day it was a bombshell. Wilson's tale is simple enough: two adventurers named Garth and Dunal set out from their home on a terraformed Moon of the future to travel to the star Rigel. Garth's ship is the ultimate in new tech; he boasts that with it, they can "...go in a year to the end of the universe. But, for a starter, how about a thousand light-years around Rigel in six months?" Taking the bait, a skeptical Dunal goes onboard even as he questions Garth's science, pointing out that Einsteinian relativity makes it clear nothing can go faster...

"Future historians will give a few paragraphs to the Saturn rockets that took us to the Moon, the shuttle that conquered Low Earth Orbit, and the aerospace plane, but they are likely to spend much more time looking at the underlying principles on which their own civilization was founded. They will know that physical technologies are the vessels for the exploration that takes place in human societies, but are not the essence of the transformations that they engender." Frank White, from The Overview Effect: Space Exploration and Human Evolution (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), p. 161.

As promised earlier in the week, here is a snippet of Frederick Turner's "Worlds Without Ends" essay from 1996; more on what he means by the 'charm industries' in a later posting. I'm not aware of an online version of this piece, but it's well worth seeking out in your local library. The arts and pleasures of the charm industries take up time and space; they also paradoxically increase both time and space by their magical powers of illusion, delay, inner articulation, and concentrated attention. But time and space, with the present buildup of physical, temporal, and cultural waste product on our planet, are becoming increasingly scarce and increasingly at a premium. We are swamped by mountains of junk information, junk production, junk cultural overflow. We will be prepared to pay top dollar for silence, horizons, the threat and presence of death, the strange and mystical experience of uneventful time. Japanese Heian princes, with all the resources of a rich civilization open to...

I've run into a fascinating discussion on American Enterprise Online titled "Look Heavenward?" -- it's a collection of articles whose description on the magazine's table of contents, "The pros and cons of spending more on manned space exploration," is wildly insufficient to describe its range. The most interesting of the pieces here consists of three thought-provoking conversations with space and astronomy pioneers. Bill Kauffman interviews comet hunter David Levy; David Isaac talks to Mars Society president Robert Zubrin; and Frederick Turner (University of Texas at Dallas poet and sometime interstellar theorist), interviews Freeman Dyson. I'll run just a few snippets, but at some point be sure to read the whole piece here. From the Zubrin interview, discussing terraforming and how humans may adapt to other worlds: ZUBRIN: I can elaborate by analogy. Human beings are not native to the Earth. We're native to East Africa. We're tropical animals. We have long, thin arms with no fur on...

From the remarkable H. G. Wells, in a 1902 lecture at London's Royal Institution: "It is conceivable that some great unexpected mass of matter should presently rush upon us out of space, whirl sun and planets aside like dead leaves before the breeze, and collide with and utterly destroy every spark of life upon this earth... It is conceivable, too, that some pestilence may presently appear, some new disease, that will destroy not 10 or 15 or 20 per cent of the earth's inhabitants as pestilences have done in the past, but 100 per cent, and so end our race... And finally there is the reasonable certainty that this sun of ours must some day radiate itself toward extinction... There surely man must end. That of all such nightmares is the most insistently convincing. And yet one doesn't believe it. At least I do not. And I do not believe in these things because I have come to believe in certain other things--in the coherency and purpose in the world and in the greatness of human destiny....

Although it originally ran in the January, 1944 issue of Astounding, I first ran into A.E. Van Vogt's "Far Centaurus" in a collection of short stories called Destination: Universe (New York: Signet Books, 1952). It would be hard today to re-create the power of the story's opening, so imbued have we become with reality-stretching concepts, but "Far Centaurus" remains the ultimate illustration of the starship paradox: why send a slow ship when a faster one will surely be built that will one day overtake it? Van Vogt's crew arrives in Alpha Centauri space only to find that there is an inhabited planetary system waiting for them, one settled long after their departure from Earth by the much faster ships that were built later. The dialogue is a bit bumpy and the science occasionally awry (van Vogt seems to think there are four, rather than three Centauri stars, for example), but the story has retained its power to this day. Image: The first paperback edition of Destination: Universe....

Patrick Moore and illustrator David Hardy first collaborated in the early 1950s, and by 1954 had drawn up plans to produce a book filled with images of space stations, Mars missions and journeys to the outer Solar System. That book never came together, though the two produced others in the 1970s. Now Moore and Hardy have teamed up again with Futures: Fifty Years in Space, subtitled 'The Challenge of the Stars.' Its lovely images fall into the 'don't miss' category, ranging from the exploration of nearby planets to strange worlds around stars thousands of light years from Earth. We need the imagining of these places -- it's a key part of the drive to explore -- and astronomical artists have been delivering scenes no one alive may ever see for a long time now. Moore and Hardy's book reminds me of the excellence of Wyn Wachhorst's The Dream of Spaceflight, a non-illustrated meditation on growing up in the space age and the nature of our compulsion to move into new terrain. Wachhorst...

Presentations from NASA's "Risk and Exploration: Earth, Sea and the Stars" symposium are now online here. Replays of the various sessions will be available on NASA TV, according to NASA Watch. Particularly germane to the interstellar question is Session Four: Why We Explore.

Theologian and scientist John Wilkins realized in 1640 that it would be possible to fly to the moon. And then Wilkins did something that hadn't been done before: he designed a vehicle consistent with the principles of his time that could make the journey. Professor Allan Chapman of Oxford, who presented the story in a lecture at Gresham College in London, thinks Wilkins' work was the first serious investigation of manned flight to the moon. You can read more in Cromwell's moonshot: how one Jacobean scientist tried to kick off the space race in the Independent. Of course, it wouldn't have worked. Wilkins believed that gravity and magnetism were more or less the same thing, and that if you could reach an altitude of 20 miles, you would escape the effects of both, continuing on to sail easily to the moon. His vehicle was a flying chariot with feathered, flapping wings and gunpowder boosters. A brief excerpt: Although earlier philosophers and poets had written about visiting the Moon,...

Long-term thinking, so unusual in our era, was once commonplace, as the centuries-long construction of the great cathedrals of Europe reminds us. Or how about the remarkable Ise Shrine, a Shinto temple in Japan whose wooden structure is periodically rebuilt, and has been every twenty years for the last thousand. So the idea of constructing a star probe whose mission might last a century -- or a thousand years -- is not inconceivable, as long as we view it as a gift to the human future as much as a mission whose end we will see. But projects with a focus on 'the long now,' as Stewart Brand calls this multilayered view of time, can be found even in our own frenetic culture. Brand's book The Clock of the Long Now describes Danny Hillis' idea of a timepiece that will last for ten thousand years, and the Long Now Foundation envisions a 10,000-year library along the same lines. The most recent time-stretching project to come to my attention is the Deccan College dictionary of Sanskrit....

SpaceShipOne's splendid achievments have me re-visiting the days of my youth, when the most remarkable video I had ever seen was the jerky footage taken from a modified V-2 rocket as it lifted off some time after the war -- Walter Kronkite used this footage as the introduction to the CBS documentary series 'Twentieth Century.' You would see the launching pad dwindling below, then the scrub desert not all that far from where SpaceShipOne flew, and as the flight progressed, just a glimpse of a stunningly curved horizon that told you how far into the unfathomable black you had traveled. How exciting the future looked in those days, as I followed the flights of the X-15, a rocket vehicle whose altitude record SpaceShipOne exceeded today. I began to puzzle over the question of nostalgia for a future that never happened, an odd notion that makes me think of all the dreams we as a culture have assigned to the future at different times in our history. Then along comes a fine essay called...

The continuing success of SpaceShipOne -- and other ventures suggestive of future commercial space activities like Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic and Robert Bigelow's Bigelow Aerospace -- bring me back to Freeman Dyson. It was in 1979, in his book Disturbing the Universe, that Dyson wrote about what he called the three 'romantic ages' of spaceflight. The first, beginning in 1927, was inaugurated by the Verein für Raumschiffahrt, Germany's Society for Space Travel, which met in Breslau that year. The VfR would include such luminaries as a young Wernher von Braun, and would make an enthusiastic contribution to early rocketry before its talents were hijacked by the German military. Dyson's second age was the era of Orion, Ted Taylor's nuclear spaceship. Working on an outrageous but theoretically plausible design that involved enormous shock absorbers cushioning nuclear blasts behind the vehicle, Orion's slogan was 'Saturn by 1970.' When in 1959 the decision was made not to use...