We usually think about habitability in terms of liquid water on the surface, which is the common definition of the term 'habitable zone.' But even in our own system, we have great interest in places where this is not the case (e.g. Europa). In today's essay, Nick Nielsen begins with the development of complex life in terms not just of a habitable zone, but what some scientists are calling an 'abiogenesis zone.' The implications trigger SETI speculation, particularly in systems whose host star is nearing the end of its life on the main sequence. Are there analogies between habitable zones and the conditions that can lead not just to life but civilization? These boundary conditions offers a new direction for SETI theorists to explore. by J. N. Nielsen Recently a paper of some interest was posted to arXiv, "There's No Place Like Home (in Our Own Solar System): Searching for ET Near White Dwarfs," by John Gertz. (Gertz has several other interesting papers on arXiv that are working...

With the conclusion of The Man in the High Castle's TV version, I've been having a few conversations about the ins and outs of turning the novel into a considerably bloated series. Or maybe I should say simply that when I realized at the end of the first season that, having made their choices and essentially filmed their version of the book, the producers were now going to go for further seasons, I was dismayed. Who would be making the choices now that the original author was not available, and how would the plot unfold? An ongoing series can do this well, of course -- consider the absorbing tale unfolding in The Expanse -- but going well outside the boundaries of a foundational novel can often be asking for trouble. While I wasn't much taken with the way The Man in the High Castle's plot played out on TV, I did go ahead and watch every episode because I found the visuals so entrancing. The idea of a Japanese occupied California was fully realized, with touches like the Japanese...

If those of us from the Apollo era sometimes look back with regret at the failure of our society to follow through on early lunar exploration, we can still acknowledge that the issue is far from settled. As Nick Nielsen points out in the essay below, we're in an interesting period, one in which commercial interests are changing how we look at future space missions, and indeed, changing our view of what may be considered the central project of our civilization. With historical sweep that takes in the death of Socrates, paleolithic art and Arthurian mythology, Nick sees as the great monuments of civilization not just the Pyramids, the Parthenon and the Taj Mahal, but also the Large Hadron Collider and the International Space Station. Here's a richly textured probe, then, into the mythologies that make us who we are and who we will be, and the forces that shape what a civilization chooses to do. by J. N. Nielsen There is a Tide in the affayres of men, Which taken at the Flood, leades on...

Searching for biosignatures in exoplanet atmospheres is something we can look forward to in as little as a decade, judging from the progress now being made in planning future ground- and space-based telescopes. A key challenge is to catalog habitable zone planets upon which to practice our methods, and our tools for doing this are steadily evolving. Take ESPRESSO (Echelle Spectrograph for Rocky OxoPlanet and Stable Spectroscopic Observations), which can reduce a star's movement to or away from us down to a minute 10 centimeters per second. You can imagine what this means for radial velocity studies, which now routinely parse the to-and-fro of stellar motions as a way of detecting exoplanets. The smaller the gravitational effect we can detect, the sharper our observations, bringing much smaller planets in range. We move from hot Jupiters and Neptunes into the realm of Earth-mass worlds around stars like the Sun. Commissioned in 2017, ESPRESSO is installed at the European Southern...

The Russian space agency Roscosmos, as most of you know, has announced the death of cosmonaut Alexei Leonov, who died last Friday at Moscow's Burdenko Hospital following a long illness. He was 85. If handling stress under extreme conditions is a prerequisite for someone who is going to the Moon, Leonov had already proven his mettle when the Soviet Union chose him as the man to pilot its lunar lander to the surface. The failure of the N-1 rocket put an end to that plan, but Leonov will always be associated with the 1965 mission aboard Voskhod 2 shared with Pavel Belyayev. This was the spacewalk mission, conducted successfully before NASA could manage the feat 10 weeks later. Image: A man and his art. Alexei Leonov was as attracted to drawing and painting as he was to flying, creating some work while in orbit. Credit: Roscosmos. The problems Leonov had with his bulky spacesuit as it ballooned out of shape are widely known, making his re-entry into the capsule a dicey affair, though one...

Larry Klaes loves science fiction movies. Those of you who have read his deep dives into such films as Forbidden Planet, Avatar or The Thing from Another World can understand why I think of Larry as the Robert Osborne of the SF movie (if you don't know who Robert Osborne was, then you're not as passionate about old movies as I am). Larry's latest is a resource-laden look into two films of the late 1970s that illustrate our evolving ideas about potential encounters with extraterrestrials. Although we don't get into films that often here on Centauri Dreams, I always like to keep an eye on how our culture comes to grip with new scientific ideas, and that's a place where popular movies become prime sources. Herewith two films that help us see how the idea of contact continues to change. by Larry Klaes The Big Picture The year 1979 was a dynamic one. It was the chronological end of the 1970s, essentially the "aftermath" decade of the previous one, the 1960s. Those earlier years saw...

As a poignant and unexpected coda to the celebrations of the Apollo 11 anniversary we learn of the death of Chris Kraft, the man who created NASA's Mission Control from scratch in the early days of the manned space program and was head of Flight Operations during that critical period. Death came at age 95 to a man who worked at ground zero in the fraught days of Mercury and Gemini, serving as flight director for all the Mercury missions and seven of the Gemini flights. Neil Armstrong would say of Kraft that he was "the 'Control' in Mission Control." Image: Christopher Kraft, flight director during Project Mercury, works at his console inside the Flight Control area at Mercury Mission Control in Houston. Kraft, the founder of NASA's Mission Control, died Monday, July 22, 2019, just two days after the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. He was 95. Credit: NASA via AP. After his work with Gemini, Kraft moved up NASA management ranks and became a senior planner for the Apollo...

I’ll close my coverage of the Apollo 11 anniversary with thoughts from Marc Millis. I was startled to discover, fifty years after watching the first landing on the Moon, that the anniversary seemed almost elegiac. So many expectations that have yet to emerge, so much energy still waiting to find an Apollo-like focus. Marc has likewise been ruminating on the Moon landings and here offers a way of placing them in context. Such an effort invariably means invoking the long view, one I found challenging to sustain because of my own freighted memories of 20 July, 1969. But I think Marc is right in looking for longer, more stable arcs of development and trends that the rush of daily activity can obscure. The former head of NASA’s Breakthrough Propulsion Physics project, Millis is also editor (with Eric Davis) of the book Frontiers of Propulsion Science (2009) and the founder of the Tau Zero Foundation. He has been developing an interstellar propulsion study from a NASA grant and recently...

If a connection between accounting and astronautics seems tenuous, it's one that Neil Armstrong invoked on the 24th of August, 2011, when he spoke before CPA Australia in Sydney, doubtless motivated by his father's career as an auditor. Armstrong stopped signing autographs in 1996 and rarely spoke in public, but accepted the Sydney invitation, according to members of the audience, because of his declared 'soft spot' for accounting. While no video was allowed during the speech, author Neil McAleer has had access to an audio recording, though one of uneven quality. What follows is an excerpt from a longer project on the Moon landing that McAleer is working on, within which he adds commentary to the parts of the speech he was able to transcribe. Armstrong's words throughout are in quotes, with McAleer's additions in standard text. The first man on the Moon would die almost exactly one year after giving this speech. "I am truly delighted to be here today and I thank you for the wonderful...

These are unusual times for a site that usually begins its investigations no closer than the outer Solar System (asteroids are an exception). But there is no way to ignore the Apollo 11 anniversary, nor would I even consider it. Tomorrow I'll have further reminiscences from Al Jackson, who was on the scene in Houston when Apollo touched the Moon, and on Friday a piece from Neil McAleer with substantial portions of a speech Neil Armstrong gave in Australia in 2011. For today, a look at how the public views space exploration in our era and earlier, with the surprising result that there seems to be more interest in space than I had assumed. In fact, while it has often seemed as if interest peaked with the moon landings and then slackened, turning instead to space programs of the imagination via high-budget films, there is new evidence that the work we track on Centauri Dreams has a good deal of support. According to a recent survey, over 70 percent of Americans liken the exploration of...

It's always good to have eyes and ears on the ground at events I can't get to, so I was pleased when Aleksandar Shulevski contacted me with the offer to send back notes from the European Space Agency's Advanced Concepts Team Interstellar Workshop in Noordwijk in the Netherlands. Born and raised in Bitola, Republic of Macedonia, Aleksandar is a science fiction reader and amateur astronomer who followed up electrical engineering studies in Skopje with an MSc in astronomy at Leiden University (Netherlands), dealing with calibration issues on the LOFAR radio telescope. He received a PhD from the University of Groningen, doing research on active galactic nuclei radio remnants observed with LOFAR. After working at the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (ASTRON) as junior telescope scientist, he is now a research scientist at the Anton Pannekoek Institute for Astronomy at the University of Amsterdam, specializing in low-frequency radio transients and pursuing his interest in SETI....

Given the difficulties that persist in retrieving many good papers from behind publisher firewalls, I'm always glad to see open access journals plying their trade. Let me call your attention in particular to Acta Futura, which comes out of the scientists working with the European Space Agency's Advanced Concepts Team. Acta Future defines itself as multidisciplinary in scope with a focus on the long-term development of space science. Hence the list of topics is wide, as the website notes, "...ranging from fundamental physics to biomimetics, mission analysis, computational intelligence, neuroscience, as well as artificial intelligence or energy systems," and this does not exhaust the range of possibilities. If you're interested in browsing through or searching the archives, click here for a page with the appropriate links as well as information on how to submit papers to Acta Futura. I've had ESA's Advanced Concepts Team on my mind this weekend because long-time Centauri Dreams reader...

Centauri Dreams' resident movie critic turns his attention to a personal favorite from the canon of science fiction films. My own memories of The Thing from Another World go back to late Saturday night black-and-white TV, where I first saw the chilling tale as a boy. The scene where the team fans out on the ice as they try to figure out what it is that is frozen down there still puts a chill down my spine. Who knew at the time that The Thing himself was James Arness, early in his career arc toward Gunsmoke's Matt Dillon? Larry gives us all the details, including reflections on the film's significance in its time and the questions it raises about our attitudes toward the unknown. Don't be surprised to find a collection of Larry's Centauri Dreams essays making its way into book form one of these days. by Larry Klaes Ah, aliens. For some humans, they are the conquering interstellar warriors of some tyrannical Galactic Empire. To others, they are angelic saviors just waiting to uplift...

Foundations of Interstellar Studies Workshop in UK A workshop on interstellar flight titled Foundations of Interstellar Studies is to take place from 27 to 30 June of this year in the town of Charfield, Gloucestershire, United Kingdom, at the current headquarters of the Initiative for Interstellar Studies. This follows an initial 'foundations' conference in 2017 that was held at City College New York and the Harvard Club of New York; future conferences, "run jointly between several organisations depending on the host country," are planned on a roughly two-year schedule. I immediately warmed to the theme that the Initiative for Interstellar Studies (i4IS) introduced by quoting Robert H. Goddard: How many more years I shall be able to work on the problem I do not know; I hope, as long as I live. There can be no thought of finishing, for 'aiming at the stars' both literally and figuratively, is a problem to occupy generations, so that no matter how much progress one makes, there is...

I became fascinated with Scandinavian mythologies in grad school and wound up doing a deep dive into early Icelandic literature. Heroic tales from a worldview long superceded proved a rich source of materials, but is myth always a thing of the past? Joseph Campbell would speak about ritual as the only way to participate in mythologies that were essentially over, but perhaps, as Nick Nielsen argues below, there is a mythology of the future that is being born right now. If humanity succeeds in expanding to the stars, how will our descendants look back upon the early age of space? Perhaps the things we do today turn into the far future’s own mythologies, particularly if waves of star travel lead to speciation or post-human outcomes. Nielsen probes cultural and philosophical aspects of an interstellar future in Grand Strategy: The View from Oregon, and Grand Strategy Annex, where as in the essay below, the outcomes of the choices we make today propel the discussion. by J. N. Nielsen 1....

Today we re-enter the realm of perspective-altering photographs, images that open new vistas in our early reconnaissance of the Solar System. Before October 7, 1959, we had little knowledge of the far side of the Moon, even though librations allowed the occasional glimpse at extremely low angles of a small part of it. The Soviet moon probe Luna 3 took the first photographs of the far side, and was followed by the much better imagery of Zond 3 in 1965. NASA's Lunar Orbiter program would continue the mapping as the 1960s progressed. Image: First glimpse. The view of the Moon's far side from Luna 3. The far side would swim into vivid focus, of course, when Apollo 8 and subsequent missions took astronauts to the Moon, but it was up to the China National Space Administration to make the first soft landing there on January 3 of this year (Ranger 4 had impacted on the far side in 1962, but without returning data before impact). Working in this environment demanded a relay satellite to...

Humans are associative creatures, and it always amazes me how a single image or a particular scent can call up a memory on some completely different topic. Some associations are general: Most people associate Strauss' magnificent Thus Sprach Zarathustra with Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey because of that movie's spectacular opening sequence. For me, those powerful sounds likewise recall Apollo. Never forget that in April of 1968, we were getting ready for the first manned Apollo test, followed in almost bewilderingly short order by the grandest voyage then imaginable, the Apollo 8 circumnavigation of the Moon. I always tie 2001 with Apollo and hear the Strauss in my mind whenever I think about Lovell, Borman and Anders reading so powerfully from Genesis that Christmas Eve. Reading Jeffrey Kluger's brilliant Apollo 8 (Henry Holt, 2017) triggered the whole melange of memories and emotions. I'm sure people of a previous generation had their own deep associations when they heard about...

The death of V.S. Naipaul (1932-2018), that cross-grained and all too combative man who saw so unflinchingly into the post-colonial lands from which he drew his heritage, invariably brings to mind his strangest novel, The Enigma of Arrival (Vintage Books, 1987). Temporarily settled into a cottage in Wiltshire in rural England, the author looks back on his career in search of a renewal as cyclic as the seasons. Landscape inspires creativity in this deeply visualized microcosm, even as Naipaul broods over the painting that gives the book its title. The novel is an odd, self-indulgent work, one I completed more out of a sense of duty (I was reviewing it for a newspaper) than enthusiasm. Yet its introspective imagery keeps resonating. Naipaul was obsessed with the sub-story of the painting, showing the arrival of a visitor at a strange port city and implying a subsequent journey that would in some way parallel his own career. The work of Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978), ‘The Enigma of...

Ever since I started Centauri Dreams in 2004, I've been talking about the question of infrastructure within the Solar System. My thinking has always been that while we will doubtless get off interstellar missions beginning with robotics on an ad hoc basis during this century, the prospect of a sustained effort will require a built-out infrastructure that will help us create and test out deep space systems of many kinds, from new propulsion technologies to closed loop life support experiments. One step at a time, but do this right and we may push deep into the Kuiper Belt, then the Oort Cloud and, we can hope, beyond. That's a long-term vision and it clashes with what we've seen since Apollo, a retreat from lunar exploration by humans that may eventually be reversed as we think about partnerships between commercial aerospace and government space programs. To explore these concepts, an upcoming meeting called the TVIW Symposium on The Power of Synergy is to be held in Oak Ridge, TN...

Although we've seen spectacular images from deep space with the help of Voyager, New Horizons and numerous other spacecraft, the view from 1 million kilometers out can still put our world in perspective. Below is what a CubeSat called Mars Cube One (MarCO-B), one of a pair of such diminutive spacecraft, saw from that distance as it turned its camera back toward Earth. At the sides of the image you can see bits of the thermal blanket, the high-gain antenna feed and the HGA itself at the right, but in the center is the place we call home, the Earth-Moon system. You may want to zoom in to see the Moon better. Image: The first image captured by one of NASA's Mars Cube One (MarCO) CubeSats. The image, which shows both the CubeSat's unfolded high-gain antenna at right and the Earth and its moon in the center, was acquired by MarCO-B on May 9. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech. I've been keeping an eye on the MarCO CubeSats because they are the first of their type to be sent into deep space. The...