Expect no new posts until Monday and a slowdown in comment moderation as I attend the Breakthrough Initiatives event in Palo Alto. As has been my practice at previous such events, I won't try to cover the talks and discussions live. While 'live blogging' has its place and seems to work for things like product introductions, I don't find it useful for scientific conferences, where I need to take lots of notes and think about the implications of what I've written. But I'll come back from Stanford with plenty of things to talk about, and we'll use all of next week sorting them out. Dinner tonight with Jim and Greg Benford, my son Miles, and my old friend Claudio Maccone, with whom I'll be talking SETI, the FOCAL mission (to the Sun's gravity lens), and the best methods of data retrieval for a mission like Breakthrough Starshot. Many more good discussions ahead. SETI is a big part of this conference, but Alpha Centauri looms large.

Marc Millis is once again in the media, this time interviewed by a BBC crew in a show about controlling gravity. The impetus is an undertaking I described in the first chapter of Frontiers of Propulsion Science, Project Greenglow. The former head of NASA's Breakthrough Propulsion Physics project and founding architect of the Tau Zero Foundation, as well as co-editor with Eric Davis of the aforesaid book, Millis has some thoughts on how we discuss these matters in the media, and offers clarifications on how work on futuristic technologies should proceed. by Marc Millis A BBC 'Horizons' episode will air next Wednesday, March 23 (8pm UK) about the Quest for Gravity Control. The show features, among other things, an interview with myself about my related work during NASA's Breakthrough Propulsion Physics project and thereafter with the Tau Zero Foundation. Quoting from an advertisement for the show, Project Greenglow - The Quest for Gravity Control: This is the story of an extraordinary...

Herewith the first of several reports on the recent Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop; more next week. It comes from Doug Loss, who was a participant in the Homo Stellaris working track I had hoped to attend before illness changed my plans. An experienced network and IT security administrator, Doug attended and eventually organized The Asimov Seminar from 1977 until the early 2000s, a yearly, four-day-long retreat at a conference center in upstate New York. Isaac Asimov, the noted science fiction author, was the star of the Seminar and its main draw until his death in 1992. Each year the Seminar would explore a different topic having to do with the future of human society, with Seminar attendees assuming roles that would allow them to examine the questions associated with that year's topic on a personal basis. TVIW is likewise following a highly interactive workshop strategy, as Doug's report attests. The photos below come from New York photojournalist Joey O'Loughlin, and are...

I often think about virtual reality and the prospect of immersive experience of distant worlds using data returned by our probes. But what of the state of virtual reality today, a technology that is suddenly the talk of the computer world with the imminent release of the Oculus Rift device? Frank Taylor is just the man to ask. He has worked with computer graphics since the 1970s, starting at the University of Arizona. He worked several years at aerospace companies in support of DoD and NASA including simulation and virtual reality technology in support of astronaut training at NASA JSC. Frank has also been a successful entrepreneur doing work with Internet and other computer technologies. His most notable recent accomplishment was the completion of one orbit of the Earth at 0 MSL - he and his wife left in 2009 and sailed around the world arriving back in the US in 2015. Frank is the publisher of Google Earth Blog since 2005. Have a look now at the surprisingly wide possibilities...

His interest fired by an interview with interstellar researcher Greg Matloff, Dale Tarnowieski became fascinated with the human future in deep space. One result is the piece that follows, an essay that feeds directly into a recent wish of mine. I had been struck by how many people coming to Centauri Dreams are doing so for the first time, and thinking that I would like to run the occasional overview article placing the things we discuss here in a broader context. Dale's essay does precisely this, looking at our future as a species on time frames that extend to the death of our planet. Dale retired in January 2015 from the position of assistant director of communications with New York City College of Technology/CUNY, a veteran journalist and editor of "Connections," the college's print and online magazine. He also did considerable writing for the New York City College of Technology Foundation and its annual Best of New York Award Dinner (and continues to do so on a freelance basis)....

Because Centauri Dreams focuses on the outer system and beyond, I haven't had much to say about Mars, knowing how many good sites there are that cover developments there. But today's post is timely not only because of recent depictions of Mars in film but also because long-term sustainability is critical to a lasting human presence off-world. Dr. Ioannis Kokkinidis is a native of Piraeus, Greece. He graduated with a Master of Science in Agricultural Engineering from the Department of Natural Resources Management and Agricultural Engineering of the Agricultural University of Athens. He holds a Mastère Spécialisé Systèmes d'informations localisées pour l'aménagement des territoires (SILAT) from AgroParisTech and AgroMontpellier and a PhD in Geospatial and Environmental Analysis from Virginia Tech. Have a look now at what we could do to sustain a human settlement on another world. By Ioannis Kokkinidis I believe most readers of this blog have seen Ridley...

The very small may lead us to the very large. Payload sizes, for one thing, can be shrunk as we increasingly master the art of miniaturization, giving us far more bang for the buck. In that sense, we can think about tiny interstellar probes that may one day be sent, as Robert Freitas has envisioned, in waves of exploration, each of them no larger than a sewing needle, but armed with artificial intelligence and capable of swarm-like behavior. Mastering the tiny thus enables the longest of all journeys. But thinking about small payloads also makes me ponder much larger constructs. Suppose in a hundred years we can work at the atomic level to build structures out of the abundant raw material available in the asteroid or Kuiper belts. It's possible to imagine enormous arcologies of the kind discussed by Gerard O'Neill that may one day house substantial human populations. In this way nanotech opens the door to renovation in the realm of gigantic colony worlds. And if one of these colony...

It's been awhile since I've seen Ian Crawford (Birkbeck College, London) -- I think we last talked at one of the 100 Year Starship events -- but I'm pleased to see his latest popular essay How to build a starship - and why we should start thinking about it now. A professor of planetary sciences and advocate of manned space exploration here in the Solar System, Crawford takes on the necessary task of acquainting a larger audience with something Robert Forward put forth as a maxim: 'Starflight is difficult and expensive, but not impossible.' Following decades of work on beamed sail technologies, antimatter and space tethers, Forward wrote that line in 1996, but it summed up statements he had been making for decades. Gregory Matloff and Eugene Mallove would echo him in their Starflight Handbook (Wiley, 1989), with an emphasis on the 'difficult' aspect of the journey: "Starflight is not just very hard, it is very, very, very hard!" So I guess we could say starflight is hard3. Matloff,...

If you're interested enough in space to be reading this site, you've probably run into the name of Wan Hu. He's the subject of a tale that may well be spurious, but it's certainly lively. It seems that some time around the year 1500 AD, Wan Hu took his fascination with rocketry to the logical limit by building a chair equipped with 47 gunpowder rockets. Lit by 47 attendants, the combined rockets took Wan Hu somewhere, but just where is unknown, as he is said to have disappeared with a loud bang, leaving only a pall of smoke hanging over the scene. The first rocket man? Maybe. But experts on science in China find it more likely that the tale was invented somewhere in Europe, during a period (17th-19th century) when Chinese motifs were much in vogue. Frank Winter (National Air and Space Museum, Washington DC) did his own investigation and could find no mention of Wan Hu in Ming Dynasty biographical guides or histories. And apparently there are variants involving not Wan Hu but 'Wang...

Let's start the year off with a reflection on things past. Specifically, a story called "A City Near Centaurus," set on a planet circling one of the Alpha Centauri stars. Just which star is problematic, because our author, Bill Doede, describes it as a planet circling 'Alpha Centaurus II.' I'm sure he means Centauri B, but the story, which appeared in Galaxy at the end of Frederick Pohl's first year as editor, is less concerned about nomenclature and setting than the conflict between a humanoid alien called Maota and the timeless city he lives in. Michaelson, our human protagonist, looks out upon this long deserted metropolis: He gazed out from his position at the complex variety of buildings before him. Some were small, obviously homes. Others were huge with tall, frail spires standing against the pale blue sky. Square buildings, ellipsoid, spheroid. Beautiful, dream-stuff bridges connected tall, conical towers, bridges that still swung in the wind after half a million years. Late...

I first encountered Michael Chorost in his fine book World Wide Mind (Free Press, 2011), which looks at the relationship between biology and the machine tools that can enhance it. Mike's thinking on SETI has already produced rich discussion in these pages (see, for example, SETI: Contact and Enigma). In today's essay, he's asking for reader reactions to the provocative ideas on insect memory and intelligence that will inform his next book. While it does not happen on Earth, can evolution invent -- somewhere -- a social insect society capable of long-term memory and civilization? A nearby planet evidently hostile to our kind of life offers fertile ground for speculation. by Michael Chorost I've admired Paul Gilster's Centauri Dreams for many months and I've always been impressed by the quality of the comments. Paul graciously allowed me to write a guest entry to test one of my book-in-progress's ideas on a smart audience -- you. This book-in-progress will be my third book. My first...

The essay that follows is a much expanded version of a brief post that ran here last April, the idea being to give our Voyager spacecraft one last (symbolic) mission. It will run later this year in a publication called 'Handbook of the Unknowable,' produced by Espen Gangvik (Director Trondheim Biennale, Norway) and edited by Rachel Armstrong (Newcastle University, UK) and Rolf Hughes (Stockholm University of the Arts). The book will appear in conjunction with Meta.Morf 2016, a recurring Scandinavian festival dedicated to art and technology, which convenes this year in Trondheim. Armstrong, a familiar figure here on Centauri Dreams, tells me that the Handbook will use its essays, poetry, fiction and art to explore our engagement with space and our future among the stars. Meta.Morf 2016 will take place on March 10-11, and I commend both it and the Handbook to you. More on the event as we get closer. Let me also take this opportunity to wish all my readers the very best for the...

Back in 2012 I reported on Peter Garretson's What Our Civilization Needs is a Billion Year Plan, an essay advocating a robust human expansion to the stars. Lt. Col. Garretson lives and breathes futuristic issues. A transformational strategist for the US Air Force, he has served as an airpower strategist and strategic policy advisor to the Chief of Staff of the Air Force on his Strategic Studies Group, the Chief of Irregular Warfare Strategy, Plans and Policy, and spent four years as the Chief of Future Technology for HQ USAF Strategic Planning. He is currently an Instructor of Joint Warfare at Air Command and Staff College and the lead for Space Horizons, Air University's endeavor to "re-imagine spacepower in the age of asteroid mining." A long-time space advocate, he has written widely on issues ranging from planetary defense to solar power; you can follow his work at his website: http://www.petergarretson.com/. In today's open letter to Centauri Dreams, he lays down a first draft...

In the heady days of Apollo, Mars by 2000 looked entirely feasible. Now we're talking about the 2030s for manned exploration, and even that target seems to keep receding. In the review that follows, Michael Michaud looks at Louis Friedman's new book on human spaceflight, which advocates Mars landings but cedes more distant targets to robotics. So how do we reconcile ambitions for human expansion beyond Mars with political and economic constraints? A career diplomat whose service included postings as Counselor for Science, Technology and Environment at U.S. embassies in Paris and Tokyo, and Director of the State Department's Office of Advanced Technology, Michael is also the author of Contact with Alien Civilizations (Copernicus, 2007). Here he places the debate over manned missions vs. robotics in context, and suggests a remedy for pessimism about an expansive future for Humankind. by Michael A.G. Michaud Many people in the space and astronomy communities will know of Louis Friedman,...

Justin Atchison’s name started appearing in these pages all the way back in 2007 when, in a post called Deep Space Propulsion via Magnetic Fields, I described his work at Cornell on micro-satellites the size of a single wafer of silicon. Working with Mason Peck, Justin did his graduate work on chip-scale spacecraft dynamics, solar sails and propulsion via the Lorentz force, ideas I’ve tracked ever since. He’s now an aerospace engineer at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, where he focuses on trajectory design and orbit determination for Earth and interplanetary spacecraft. As a 2015 NIAC fellow he is researching technologies that enable asteroid gravimetry during spacecraft flybys. In the entry that follows, Justin reports on his trip to Jerusalem for this fall’s International Astronautical Congress. by Justin A. Atchison Greetings. I’m Justin Atchison, an aerospace engineer at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. I’m proud to have previously...

Kelvin Long is chief editor of the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society and the author of Deep Space Propulsion (Springer, 2011). A founder and first project leader of Project Icarus, the ongoing re-design of the Project Daedalus starship, Kelvin is also a co-founder of the non-profit Icarus Interstellar. He now serves as executive director of the Institute for Interstellar Studies, an organization whose mission ('Scientia ad Sidera: Knowledge to the Stars') he describes in the following essay. by Kelvin F. Long The Initiative for Interstellar Studies (i4is) is a not-for-profit foundational institute incorporated in the United Kingdom with the mandate to develop interstellar capabilities. We at the initiative just successfully passed our third anniversary since our founding. We began work in August 2012 and went live on the 12th September 2012. Shortly after, we ratified our purpose through our innovative logo, and our mission and vision statements. And today we are focused...

Science fiction is much on my mind this morning, having just been to a second viewing of The Martian (this time in 3D, which I didn't much care for), and having just read a new paper on wormholes that suggests a bizarre form of communication using them. More about both of these in a moment, but the third reason for the SF-slant is where I'll start. The 100 Year Starship organization's fourth annual symposium is now going on in Santa Clara (CA), among whose events is the awarding of the first Canopus Awards for Interstellar Writing. A team of science fiction writers will anchor what the organization is calling Science Fiction Stories Night on Halloween Eve. Among the writers there, I'm familiar with the work of Pat Murphy, whose novel The Falling Woman (Tor, 1986) caught my eye soon after publication. I remember reading this tale of an archaeological dig in Central America and the 'ghosts' it evokes with fascination, although it's been long enough back that I don't recall the details....

Heath Rezabek began exploring Vessel, an evolving strategy for preserving Earth's cultures and biology, in these pages back in 2013. A librarian and writer in Austin TX, Heath went on to push these ideas into the realm of science fiction, in the form of a series of excerpts from a longer work that is still emerging. The concluding post in this sequence appears below, though you'll be hearing more about 'Woven Light.' A novel is emerging from this haunting look at how, at various points in our future and with a wide range of technologies, we will interact with the artifacts and stored experience of our past. Heath's helpful synopsis begins the post. by Heath Rezabek For some time, I have had in hand the final chapter – for now – of the Woven Light speculative fiction series as published on Centauri Dreams from 2013 to present. At Paul’s invitation, I am prefacing the final installment with some notes on the series as a whole. The series began as a way to explore ideas surrounding the...

Like the Voyagers and Cassini before it, New Horizons is a gift that keeps on giving. As I looked at the latest Pluto images, I was drawn back to Chesley Bonestell's depiction of Pluto, a jagged landscape under a dusting of frozen-out atmosphere. Bonestell's images in The Conquest of Space (Viking, 1949) took the post-World War II generation to places that were only dimly seen in the telescopes of the day, Pluto being the tiniest and most featureless of all. But paging through my copy of the book, I'm struck by how, in the case of Pluto, even Bonestell's imagination failed to do it justice. The sense of surprise that accompanies many of the incoming New Horizons images reminds me of Voyager's hurried flyby of Neptune and the 'canteloupe' terrain it uncovered on Triton back in 1989. On Pluto, as it turns out, we have 'snakeskin' terrain, just as unexpected, and likewise in need of a sound explanation. Image: In this extended color image of Pluto taken by NASA's New Horizons...

It's no exaggeration to say that without Greg Matloff, there would have been no Centauri Dreams. After reading his The Starflight Handbook (Wiley, 1989) and returning to it for years, I began working on my own volume in 2001. Research for that book would reveal Matloff's numerous contributions in the journals, especially on solar sail technologies, where he illustrated early on the methods and materials needed for interstellar applications. A professor of physics at New York City College of Technology (CUNY) as well as Hayden Associate at the American Museum of Natural History, Dr. Matloff is the author of, among others, Deep Space Probes (Springer, 2005) and Solar Sails: A Novel Approach to Interplanetary Travel (with Les Johnson and Giovanni Vulpetti; Copernicus, 2008). His latest, Starlight, Starbright, is now available from Curtis Press, treating the controversial subject of today's essay. by Greg Matloff Introduction: Motivations As any web search will reveal, most of my...