How big a role space travel will play in our future is a question with implications for our civilization's intellectual, economic and philosophical growth. It may even be the hinge upon which swings the survival of the planet. But as Centauri Dreams regular Nick Nielsen points out in the essay below, enthusiasts for spacefaring can overlook historical analogies that show us the many ways humans can shape their culture. Numerous scenarios swing into view. An interstellar future may not be in the cards, depending on the choices we make, which is why seeing space travel in perspective is crucial for shaping the exploratory outcome many of us hope to see. By J. N. Nielsen The Role of Spacefaring in Spacefaring Civilizations What is, and what will be, the role of spacefaring in spacefaring civilizations? If we count the present human spacefaring capability as constituting a contemporary spacefaring civilization, the question can be partly addressed by assessing the role of spacefaring in...

My doctor is a long-time friend who always stops during my annual physical to ask about what's going on in the hunt for exoplanets. Last week he surprised me when, after I had described ways of analyzing a transiting planet's atmosphere, he asked whether planets could give rise to civilizations in different epochs. Why just one, in other words, given that homo sapiens has only been around for several hundred thousand years? Our technological civilization is a very recent, and to this point a short-lived phenomenon. Were there others? I was startled because Adam Frank (University of Rochester) and Gavin Schmidt (NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies) have recently raised a stir with a paper on what they call the 'Silurian Hypothesis,' the name deriving from a Doctor Who TV episode referencing intelligent reptiles called Silurians who come to life when accidentally awakened. As the authors point out in their paper: We are not however suggesting that intelligent reptiles actually...

I don't usually reproduce news releases here, but this one is of unusual interest given that I am both a strong supporter of Breakthrough Starshot and a partisan for getting academic conferences available through live streaming. Breakthrough Discuss begins today and its sessions will be well worth your time, given the array of distinguished speakers and the tight attention to matters interstellar. The third annual Breakthrough Discuss scientific conference (https://breakthroughinitiatives.org/events/discussconference2018), which will bring together leading astrobiologists, astronomers, engineers, and astrophysicists to advance discussion around recent discoveries of potential life in the universe and novel ideas for space exploration, will be held on Thursday, April 12, and Friday, April 13, and full sessions will be available for live viewing on YouTube. The two days of discussions will focus on "Alien Life: Diversity in the Universe," with sessions discussing the search for life in...

The Tau Zero Foundation expresses it deepest sympathies to the family, friends and colleagues of Stephen Hawking. His death is a loss to the the world, to our scientific communities, and to all who value courage in the face of extreme odds.

Thinking about Ursula Le Guin takes me to a single place. It is a snow-driven landscape, a glaciated world of constant winter called Gethen, whose name means 'winter' in the language of its people. I was reading The Left Hand of Darkness while snow pelted down outside one afternoon in upstate New York, waiting for my wife to get back from her teaching job, nursing a cup of tea and finding my mental location fusing with Le Guin's fascinating world. For The Left Hand of Darkness was a spectacular introduction to Le Guin. I had seen her name and even had, somewhere in the stacks, a copy of her first novel, Rocannon's World (1966), part of an Ace Double that I never got around to reading. The Left Hand of Darkness came out in 1969 but it was in the late 70's that I read it. I had been through "The Word for World is Forest" when reading Again, Dangerous Visions (1972), one of Harlan Ellison's anthologies, and although it won a Hugo Award in 1973, I hadn't found it as much compelling as...

Will we recognize life if and when we find it elsewhere in the cosmos? It's a challenging question because we have only the example of life on our own world to work with. Fred Hoyle's The Black Cloud raised the question back in 1957, a great memory for me because this was one of the earlier science fiction novels that I ever read. I remember sitting there with it in my 5th grade class in St. Louis, Missouri, having been loaned the paperback that had begun to circulate among my fellow students. I was mesmerized by the account of life as I had never imagined it. Hoyle, you'll recall, creates a vast cloud of gas and dust that turns out to be a kind of super-organism, and I leave the rest of this tale to those fortunate enough to be coming to it for the first time. But we've had the same conversation about Robert Forward's 'Cheela' recently, living as they do on the surface of a neutron star. The question is one Jacob Bronowski circulated widely through his televised series The Ascent of...

The recent burst of interest in interstellar flight has surely been enhanced by the exoplanet discoveries that have become almost daily news. Finding interesting planets, some of them with the potential for water on their surfaces, inevitably raises the question of how we might find a way to get there. We can only imagine this accelerating as missions like the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) and the James Webb Space Telescope begin to fill in not just our inventory of nearby planets but our understanding of their compositions. Find a terrestrial class planet around another star -- we may find that there is more than one around the Alpha Centauri stars -- and the interstellar probe again becomes a topic of lively conversation. Breakthrough Starshot, the hugely ambitious attempt to develop a concept for tiny payloads being delivered through beamed laser propulsion to a nearby star, is by now a major part of the discussion. And as I said in my closing remarks at the recent...

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.

Most of us fortunate enough to see 2001: A Space Odyssey in a theater when it was released never dreamed it would spawn a strange 'twin.' But as Larry Klaes explains in the essay that follows, Dark Star was to emerge as a telling satire on the themes of the Kubrick film. Originating in the ideas of USC film students John Carpenter and Dan O'Bannon, Dark Star likewise plays into the screenplay for 1979's Alien in ways that have to be seen to be believed. Larry is quite a fan of the film, and explains how and why socially relevant screenplays like these would soon be swamped by blockbuster hits crammed with special effects (think Star Wars). But that orange 'beach ball' still has a place in film history. Read on. By Larry Klaes Science fiction has certainly played an important role in inspiring and influencing humanity’s future directions. The father of American rocketry, Robert H. Goddard, was moved to imagine sending a vessel to the planet Mars as a young man in 1899 after reading...

I know I said I wouldn't post for a bit, but because I've just given my closing remarks at the Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop, they are ready to go for publication, and I thought I would go ahead and publish them here. I did much of the actual writing for this at the conference (where I still am), so there may be a few typos. I haven't inserted the affiliations of the speakers, either, but I'd like to go ahead and get this up. My plan, once I've taken care of other obligations in the next ten days or so, is then to return to TVIW with greater focus and look at specific papers that caught my eye and the ways they fit in with the larger interstellar picture. For more background on the speakers here until then, check the TVIW 2017 Symposium page. I also didn't mention the excellent workshop sessions in this talk because they had just been summarized immediately before my own talk. But more on them as well as other TVIW observations when I return to regular Centauri Dreams posts....

The recent reminder of spacecraft longevity that the Voyagers have given us on their 40th anniversary keeps the memory of their famous Golden Records fresh. After all, only the passage of time -- and a lot of it -- can degrade these human artifacts, and they carry sights and sounds of our planet specifically chosen to represent us. Now Jon Lomberg, who was design director for the Golden Record, has thoughts of doing something similar with another long-haul spacecraft, the outer system explorer New Horizons, and has launched a Kickstarter campaign to make it happen. Clearly the method has to change, given that New Horizons launched without artifacts designed to carry information about our species, other than the obvious message implicit in its own technology. The plan is to take advantage of the spacecraft's computer memory, or in this case, a few hundred megabytes out of a 4 GB memory chip, which was state of the art in the days when the New Horizons design was finalized. What...

In which Larry Klaes concludes his analysis of Forbidden Planet, the still revered science fiction classic from the 1950s. If you ever had any questions about this film, Larry is your man, and note the full complement of online resources at the end of the essay. by Larry Klaes Space Madness Adams: "How have the men stood the voyage?" Doc: "About average. A few cases of space-blues - a little epidemic of claustro during the seventh month. But nobody's had to have shock therapy except the Cook." Adams: "Yes, I could taste it in the chow." The above was yet another bit of dialogue from the indispensable 1954 version of the Forbidden Planet film script which did not survive to the 1956 release. The Captain and the ship's doctor were discussing the psychological state of the C-57D crew after their year-long journey from Earth Base just before landing on Altair 4. I presume this was largely done for the knowledge benefit of the viewing audience - either that or Adams is surprisingly...

Larry Klaes takes the helm today and tomorrow while I finish up some necessary (not space related) business. Most Centauri Dreams readers, I'm assuming, have seen Forbidden Planet, the 1956 science fiction tale that proved so influential on later depictions of interstellar travel and encounters with alien intelligence, not just in film but on radio and television. Looking at everything from the film's original script to its effect on Star Trek and beyond, Larry connects the world of Forbidden Planet to its historical context as well as its echoes, which still resonate as we continue the exploration of our own Solar System. What can a 1950's movie tell us about flight to the stars? Quite a lot, as Larry explains. By Larry Klaes The cinema has had a huge influence on modern society since the day it was introduced to the world in the late Nineteenth Century. I am referring not just to the masses being regularly entertained by "the movies" for generations on a global scale or Hollywood...

I've spent part of each day recently working on a short presentation I'll be giving at the Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop, coming up in early October. I like this year's motto -- "Step by Step: Building a Ladder to the Stars" -- because it picks up on a theme I've cited here before, the maxim by Lao Tzu that "You accomplish the great task by a series of small acts." Despite its regional name, TVIW now draws speakers from all over the world. Co-founder Les Johnson encapsulates the idea behind the sessions, emphasizing the workshop concept: "The Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop is an opportunity for relaxed sharing of ideas in directions that will stimulate and encourage Interstellar exploration including propulsion, communications, and research. The 'Workshop' theme suggests that the direction should go beyond that of a 'conference'. Attendees are encouraged to not only present intellectual concepts but to develop these concepts to suggest projects, collaboration, active...

Talk about transit depth! Those of you in the path of totality are fortunate indeed as we see just how deep a light curve can get. I've never experienced totality and won't this time, but we'll get plenty of good science out of this event and a spectacular 160 seconds for those in the path. As the Sun's corona is revealed, think about the solar wind -- the stream of charged particles flowing from the corona out to the heliosphere -- and how we might one day use similar stellar winds to brake the onrush of an interstellar probe with a magsail as it nears destination. Image: The Moon's shadow will dramatically affect insolation — the amount of sunlight reaching the ground — during the total solar eclipse. Credit: NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio 160 seconds of totality is a fleeting but, so I'm told, haunting experience. For scientists, though, we'd like a good bit more. Thus it's welcome news that the European Space Agency is working on Proba-3, a duo of small...

Just how long can a civilization live? It's a key question, showing up as a factor in the Drake Equation and possibly explaining our lack of success at finding evidence for ETI. But as Andrei Kardashev believed, it is possible that civilizations can live for aeons, curbed only by the resources available to them, opening up the question of how they evolve. In today's essay, Nick Nielsen looks at long-lived societies, asking whether they would tend toward stasis -- Clarke's The City and the Stars comes to mind -- and how the capability of interstellar flight plays into their choices for growth. Would we be aware of them if they were out there? Have a look at supercivilizations, their possible trajectories of development, and consider what such interstellar stagnation might look like to a young and questing species searching for answers. by J. N. Nielsen What are stagnant supercivilizations? As far as I know there are no precise definitions of supercivilizations, but this should not...

We've just lost a fine interstellar thinker. Jordin Kare has died of aortic valve failure at age 60. While Kare played a role in the Clementine lunar mapping mission and developed a reusable rocket concept in the 1990s that he thought could be parlayed into a space launch system (in typical Kare fashion, he called it "DIHYAN," for 'Do I Have Your Attention Now?'), it is through a laser sail system called SailBeam and a 'fusion runway' concept that he will most likely be remembered among those who study starflight. But he was also an active science fiction fan, 'filksinger' and poet whose name resonates wherever science fiction fans gather. To science fiction writer Jerry Pournelle, who remembered Kare to a small mailing list over the weekend, it was a song called 'Fire in the Sky' that first came to mind. The first verse: Prometheus, they say, brought God's fire down to man And we've caught it, tamed it, trained it since our history began Now we're going back to Heaven just to look...

I always keep an eye on what's going on at the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts office, which is where I ran into Jeff Nosanov's Phase I study for a solar sail called Solar System Escape Architecture for Revolutionary Science. At the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Jeff managed flight mission proposals and supported the radio isotope power program. He now lives in Washington DC, a technology entrepreneur whose fascination with spacecraft design has never diminished. In the essay below, Jeff explains the background of his first NIAC award (a second, PERIapsis Subsurface Cave Optical Explorer, would lead to Phase I and Phase II grants), and gives us an idea of the ins and outs of making ideas into reality at NIAC and JPL. For more, the website nosanov.com is about to go online, and Jeff's new podcast debuts today. By Jeff Nosanov It's an honor and a privilege to be asked to write about my near-interstellar mission work for the Tau Zero Foundation. Marc's book and Paul's writing were very...

Ben Finney, the editor (along with Eric Jones) of Interstellar Migration and the Human Experience, has died at age 83. A professor emeritus at the University of Hawaii, Finney died quietly at a nursing home in Kaimuki, according to this obituary in the Honolulu Star-Advertiser. There is much to be said about this visionary man, but I begin for our purposes with his contribution to deep space studies and interstellar thinking. For Interstellar Migration and the Human Experience, which I bought not long after it came out in 1986, turned out to be one of those key texts, and I am hardly the only person who was transformed by the ideas in its pages. I bought it purely on the basis of its title. Not yet aware of the serious studies into interstellar flight that were then being published in the journals, I marveled that here was a text that put human movement to the stars into a serious scientific and historical context and saw it as an apotheosis of the species. Image: Anthropologist and...

As we watch commercial companies launching (and landing) rockets even as NASA contemplates a Space Launch System that could get us to Mars, it's worth considering just which future we're going to see happen. In this essay, Nick Nielsen thinks about making the transition between an early spacefaring civilization to a truly system-wide space culture, and one capable of moving still further out. No technologies arise in isolation, and the financial and social contexts of the things we do interact in ways that make predicting the long haul a dicey business. There is, as Nielsen reminds us, no unilateral history, but just how contingency and serendipity will shape what we achieve in space is no easy matter to untangle. Herewith some thoughts on history, context and attempts to put a brake on rapid change. By J. N. Nielsen Diachronic and synchronic historiography In historiography a distinction is made between the diachronic and the synchronic, which is usually explained by saying that the...