When to launch a starship, given that improvements in technology could lead to a much faster ship passing yours enroute? As we saw yesterday, the problem has been attacked anew by René Heller (Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research), who re-examined a 2006 paper from Andrew Kennedy on the matter. Heller defines what he calls 'the incentive trap' this way: The time to reach interstellar targets is potentially larger than a human lifetime, and so the question arises of whether it is currently reasonable to develop the required technology and to launch the probe. Alternatively, one could effectively save time and wait for technological improvements that enable gains in the interstellar travel speed, which could ultimately result in a later launch with an earlier arrival. All this reminds me of a conversation I had with Greg Matloff, author of the indispensable The Starflight Handbook (Wiley, 1989) about this matter. We were at Marshall Space Flight Center in 2003 and I...

Richard Trevithick’s name may not be widely known today, but he was an important figure in the history of transportation. A mining engineer from Cornwall, Trevithick (1771-1833) built the first high pressure steam engine, and was able to put it to work on a railway known as the Penydarren because it moved along the tramway of the Penydarren Ironworks, in Merthyr Tydfil, Wales, running 14 kilometers until reaching the canal wharf at Abercynon. The inaugural trip marked the first railway journey hauled by a locomotive, and it proceeded at a blistering 4 kilometers per hour. The year was 1804. Image: The replica Trevithick locomotive and attendant bar iron bogies at the Welsh Industrial & Maritime Museum in 1983. Credit: National Museum of Wales. Consider, as René Heller (Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research) does in a new paper, how Trevithick’s accomplishment serves as a kind of bookend for 211 years of historical data on the growth in speed in human-made vehicles from the...

I had thought at the end of last year that 2017 would be a year of few conferences held by the various interstellar organizations. In fact, the Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop was the only one I was sure would occur, a meeting I knew about because it was being held in partnership with the Tau Zero Foundation as well as Starship Century. Since then, we've had news of the Foundations of Interstellar Studies Workshop sponsored by the Initiative for Interstellar Studies. Background on these two, including details on registration and submitting papers, can be found in Interstellar Conference News. Now the details of a late summer meeting to be held by Icarus Interstellar have emerged. Based on the group's online description, this is to be the third in the Starship Congress meetings, the first of which I attended in Dallas in 2013. A second was held at Drexel University in Philadelphia in 2015. Image: The 2013 Starship Congress in Dallas was a great meeting. In front at the far...

Although I hadn't thought I would get a post off today, I do want to get this Breakthrough Initiatives news release out about the upcoming Breakthrough Discuss meeting. Pay particular attention to the online options for participating. BREAKTHROUGH INITIATIVES TO HOST WORLD-RENOWNED SCIENTISTS AND SCHOLARS IN SUMMIT ON LIFE IN THE UNIVERSE AND SPACE EXPLORATION Second annual "Breakthrough Discuss" conference held April 20-21 and broadcast on Facebook Live San Francisco - April 18, 2017 - Breakthrough Initiatives today announced its second annual Breakthrough Discuss scientific conference, which will bring together leading astronomers, engineers, astrobiologists and astrophysicists to advance discussion surrounding recent discoveries of potentially habitable planets in nearby star systems. The conference will take place on Thursday, April 20 and Friday, April 21, at Stanford University. The two days of discussions will focus on newly discovered Earth-like "exoplanets" in the Alpha...

Analemma seems the perfect name for the proposed ‘floating’ space tower being discussed by the Clouds Architecture Office, an imaginative New York firm whose unusual designs include a Martian habitat made of ice and a concept study of flight into deep space using comets for resources. An analemma is a diagram that traces the movement of the Sun in the sky as seen from a particular location on Earth. Over time, the position changes because of orbital eccentricity and our planet’s axial tilt, so that a slim figure-eight is the result. That’s relevant to the Analemma tower because it is conceived as a huge construction tethered to an asteroid that would be moved into what the firm describes as ‘an eccentric geosynchronous orbit’ over Earth. The orbit allows the structure to move between the northern and southern hemispheres, tracing out a figure-eight over the surface. With the slowest speed over the ground at the top and bottom of the figure-eight, Clouds Architecture Office suggests...

Registration is now open for the 2017 Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop, which will be held in Huntsville, AL on October 4-6. The title for this year's conference is "Step By Step: Building a Ladder to the Stars." The registration page is here, and if you're thinking of attending, I recommend registering right away, as spaces filled up swiftly the last time around. This year's TVIW will take place in partnership with the Tau Zero Foundation as well as Starship Century, which has already produced two successful symposia of its own. Despite its regional name, the Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop has become a well received forum for interstellar discussions on a global scale, with speakers and workshop participants well known to Centauri Dreams readers. Registration at this year's event costs $175, with discounts available for students. Pre-symposium seminars for an additional fee are to be held on Tuesday October 3. This year's topics are Conflict in Space; Laser Propulsion:...

When we contemplate contact scenarios between ourselves and extraterrestrial civilizations, we can profit from remembering our own history. The European arrival in the Americas is often a model, but there are other events of equal complexity. In the essay below, Michael Michaud looks at America's encounter with Japan to examine how we might react to a civilization not vastly more advanced in technology than our own. A familiar figure on Centauri Dreams, Michaud is now retired from an extensive diplomatic career that took him from director of the U.S. State Department's Office of Advanced Technology to chairman of working groups at the International Academy of Astronautics that discuss SETI issues, along with posts as Counselor for Science, Technology and Environment at U.S. embassies in Paris and Tokyo. He is also the author of the seminal Contact with Alien Civilizations (Springer, 2007). By Michael A.G. Michaud In the literature about possible future contact with an...

I was saddened to learn through Tau Zero Foundation CEO Rhonda Stevenson of the recent death of Loretta Jackson Delong. Stevenson issued this statement The Tau Zero Foundation extends its sincerest condolences to Dan DeLong, the XCOR and Agile families for the great loss of Loretta Jackson Delong. She was a pioneer from the start, as she knew from the time she was twelve that she would build and fly spaceships. Through her life's journey, she repeatedly demonstrated rigor and grit, and she will be missed. The loss hits home particularly at Tau Zero because Aleta, as she was known to her friends, was a co-founder of XCOR, where she worked closely with co-founder and former CEO Jeff Greason, who is now chairman of the Tau Zero Foundation board. She would go on to collaborate with Greason again in the creation of Agile Aero, a Midland, TX-based startup targeting rapid design and prototyping techniques for space launch, hypersonic vehicles, and innovative aircraft. Greason is CEO of...

Aliens used to look more or less like humans in the films of the 1950s. Think Michael Rennie in The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), a polished alien presence if there ever was one. We got humanoid aliens with strange powers or technologies, like Jeff Morrow playing Exeter in This Island Earth (1955) -- a prominent forehead and strange hair is all it takes. Even James Arness' vegetable man (The Thing from Another World, 1951), although seen but briefly and on a rampage, is recognizably humanoid. Image: James Arness makes his appearance in Howard Hawks' The Thing from Another World. I watched all those films and many other SF movies besides when I was growing up, almost all on TV re-runs. Later, special effects would vastly improve, and non-humanoid aliens thrived, my favorite being the repulsive title character in Ridley Scott's Alien (1979), so dramatically visualized by Swiss surrealist Hans Rudolf Giger. Now we see aliens in all shapes and sizes, from the many-toothed predator...

The relentless expansion implicit in the Kardashev scale ranks civilizations according to their use of power, with the notion that there is an upward movement from exploiting the energy resources of a planet to the entire home star and then on to the galaxy (Type III). Hence the interest in trying to observe civilizations that operate on such colossal scales. Surely a Kardashev Type III culture would, in its manipulation of such titanic energies, cast a signature that would be observable even by a relatively lowly Type .7 civilization like ours. So far we see no signs of Type III civilizations, though early searches through our astronomical data continue (see G-HAT: Searching For Kardashev Type III, for example, which gets into the Glimpsing Heat from Alien Technologies work at Penn State). In Earth in Human Hands, David Grinspoon relates the question to our own survival challenges as we deal with the so-called Anthropocene, a time when our technologies are increasingly affecting our...

Think fast. You’ve only got a day or so to work on this. You’ve been asked to come up with a plausible way of getting a fictional crew from one star to another, but laser sails and fusion rockets won’t do. The target might be thousands of light years away, so you have to be thinking faster-than-light. Maybe Miguel Alcubierre comes to mind, or perhaps a wormhole, but a nod in either direction isn’t enough. You’re being asked for a high level of detail, and you’d better have some serious equations available to show you’re not just blowing smoke. As you might guess, the question relates to the Denis Villeneuve film Arrival, which Paramount released in the U.S. last Friday following its premiere at the Venice Film Festival. No spoilers here, just an entertaining tale. For the person who was asked to dream up fast interstellar transport was Stephen Wolfram, whose public relations people had received a request from the filmmakers to upgrade the science in the film, which was based on a...

The founder of the Tau Zero Foundation takes a look at the promise of Star Trek, and asks where we stand with regard to the many technologies depicted in the series. My own first memory of Star Trek is seeing a first year episode and realizing only a few days later that it had been one of the few times a TV science fiction show never mentioned the Earth. That was an expansive and refreshing perspective-changer from the normal fare of 1966, though back then I would never have dreamed how much traction the show would gain over time. But with the series now a cultural icon, how about Starfleet's tech? Will any of it actually be achieved? by Marc Millis This week marks the 50th anniversary of Star Trek's debut. In just 3 seasons, the series started a cultural ripple effect that's still going. The starship Enterprise became an icon for a better future - predicting profound technical abilities, matched with a rewardingly responsible society, and countless wonders left to explore. Many...

No one thinks big better than Adam Crowl, a Centauri Dreams regular and mainstay of the Icarus Interstellar attempt to reconfigure the Project Daedalus starship design of the 1970's. If you're looking for ideas for science fiction stories, you'll find them in the essay below, where Adam considers the uses to which we might put the abundant energies of the Sun. Starships are a given, but what about terraforming not just one but many Solar System objects? Can we imagine a distant future when our own Moon is awash with seas, and snow is falling on a Venus in the process of transformation? To keep up with Adam, be sure to check his Crowlspace site regularly. It's where I found an earlier version of this now updated and revised essay. By Adam Crowl By 2025 Elon Musk believes SpaceX can get us to Mars - a journey of about 500 million kilometres, needing a speed of over 100,000 km/h. By comparison travelling to the stars within a human lifetime via the known laws of physics requires...

We get to the stars one step at a time, or as the ever insightful Lao Tzu put it long ago, ?"You accomplish the great task by a series of small acts." Right now, of course, many of the necessary ‘acts’ seem anything but small, but as Ian Crawford explains below, they’re a necessary part of building up the kind of space economy that will result in a true infrastructure, one that can sustain the exploration of space at the outskirts of our own system and beyond. Dr. Crawford is Professor of Planetary Science and Astrobiology in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Birkbeck College, University of London. Today he brings us a report on a discussion of these matters at the Royal Astronomical Society earlier this year. By Ian A. Crawford There is increasing interest in the possibility of using the energy and material resources of the solar system to build a space economy, and in recent years a number of private companies have been established with the stated aim of developing...

I hadn't planned the conjunction of the Breakthrough Starshot forum's opening here on Centauri Dreams and the interesting news out of the NASA budget for 2017, but some things just fall into your lap. In any case, what happened in Washington makes a nice follow-up to yesterday's post, considering that it calls up visions of fast probes to Alpha Centauri, and in a document coming out of the U.S. House of Representatives, of all things. As more than a few readers have noted, it's not often that we hear interstellar issues discussed in the halls of Congress. Call for a New Interstellar Study The specifics are that space-minded John Culberson (R-TX), who has championed space exploration with abandon, has made sure that NASA will look at the possibilities of interstellar travel. Culberson chairs the House of Representatives sub-panel in charge of NASA appropriations, and the call for interstellar study comes in a report that accompanies the bill establishing the agency's budget for the...

Ever since coming back from the Breakthrough Discuss meeting in Palo Alto, I have been pondering the enormous issues the Breakthrough Starshot project will encounter. Getting a tiny spacecraft up to twenty percent of lightspeed is only the beginning of an effort that has to deal with power generation, a phased laser array of enormous strength and complexity, the miniaturization of critical components, lightsail integrity under thrust and much more. These topics were freely discussed in Palo Alto, and especially at the Yuri's Night party that Yuri Milner threw for the assembled conference goers. When I talked to Milner at the party, he suggested an idea that we have been working on ever since. In order to keep the discussion on the critical issues involving Breakthrough Starshot in front of the interstellar community, why not set up a linkage between the discussion areas of the Breakthrough site and Centauri Dreams? This site would maintain its usual structure and separate comments,...

Before we can go to the stars we'll need to build a robust infrastructure in our own Solar System. While most attention seems to be devoted to propulsion issues, I'm convinced that an equally critical question is how we can create and sustain closed-loop life support systems for such missions. Our point man on this is Ioannis Kokkinidis, who brings a rich background from his Master of Science in Agricultural Engineering (Agricultural University of Athens) and Mastère Spécialisé Systèmes d'informations localisées pour l'aménagement des territoires from AgroParisTech and AgroMontpellier, along with a PhD in Geospatial and Environmental Analysis from Virginia Tech. Here Dr. Kokkinidis discusses what has been done so far in the matter of growing foods in space, and takes us back to a mission that might have been, a manned flyby of Venus. As Ioannis notes, getting space foods up to the sumptuous standards of Greek cuisine will indeed be a challenge, but we're...

As we move into the outer Solar System and beyond, the possibility exists that we may encounter an extraterrestrial species engaged in similar exploration. How we approach first contact has been a theme of science fiction for many years (Murray Leinster's 1945 story 'First Contact' is a classic treatment). In the essay below, Ken Wisian looks at how we can develop contact protocols to handle such a situation. A Major General in the US Air Force (now retired) with combat experience in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Balkans, Ken brings a perspective seasoned by command and a deep knowledge of military history to issues of confrontation and outcomes, building on our current rules of engagement to ask how we will manage an encounter with another civilization, one whose consequences would be momentous for our species. By Ken Wisian Ph.D Galactic Ventures LLC, Austin, Texas Abstract How do two ships approach each other in a first contact setting? When it happens it will be a pivotal moment for...

Cameron Smith is no stranger to these pages, having examined the role of evolution in human expansion into space (see Biological Evolution in Interstellar Human Migration), cultural changes on interstellar journeys (Human Universals and Cultural Evolution on Interstellar Voyages), as well as the composition of worldship crews (Optimal Worldship Populations). An anthropologist and prehistorian at Portland State University, Dr. Smith today offers up his thoughts on the emerging discipline he calls space anthropology. How do we adapt a field that has grown up around the origin and growth of our species to a far future in which humans may take our forms of culture and consciousness deep into the galaxy? What follows is the preface for Dr. Smith's upcoming book Principles of Space Anthropology: Establishing an Evolutionary Science of Human Space Settlement, to be published by Springer later this year. By Cameron M. Smith, PhD New Realms of Action Require New Domains of Expertise In 1963,...

The Breakthrough Initiatives conference I've just returned from, called Breakthrough Discuss 2016, had been a bit of a puzzle going in. Still bleary after an early morning arrival in Palo Alto, I was looking forward to getting to the Stanford campus for the first sessions the next day. Breakfasting at a small cafe near the hotel, I mulled over the possibilities. The emphasis was on astronomy, given the list of attendees, which included top names in the exoplanet hunt, but of course Breakthrough Initiatives is also funding a major SETI effort, so that would be a theme. And then there was the looming presence of the just announced Breakthrough Starshot. Balancing all this out looked to be a challenge, but as it turned out, there was a strong cross-pollination among the various themes, with the Starshot -- an unmanned flyby of Alpha Centauri and an infrastructure to sustain a further interstellar effort -- woven into the proceedings. I knew I'd come back with material for a week's worth...