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...

In Stephen Baxter's novel Ultima (Roc, 2015), Ceres is moved by a human civilization in a parallel universe toward Mars, the immediate notion being to use the dwarf planet's volatiles to help terraform the Red Planet. Or is that really the motive? I don't want to give too much away (and in any case, I haven't finished the book myself), but naturally the biggest question is how to move an object the size of Ceres into an entirely new orbit. Baxter sets up an alternate-world civilization that has discovered energy sources it doesn't understand but can nonetheless use for interstellar propulsion and the numerous demands of a growing technological society, though one that is backward in comparison to our own. That juxtaposition is interesting because we tend to assume technologies emerge at the same pace, supporting each other. What if they don't, or what if we simply stumble upon a natural phenomenon we can tap into without being able to reproduce its effects through any known science?...

Trying to observe but not harm another civilization can be tricky business, as Michael Michaud explains in the article below. While Star Trek gave us a model for non-interference when new cultures are encountered, even its fictional world was rife with departures from its stated principles. We can see the problem in microcosm in ongoing events in Peru, where a tribal culture coming into contact with its modern counterparts raises deeply ambiguous questions about its intentions. Michaud, author of Contact with Alien Civilizations (Copernicus, 2007), draws on his lengthy career in the U.S. Foreign Service to frame the issue of disruptive cultural encounter. By Michael A.G. Michaud Science fiction fans all know of the Prime Directive, usually described as avoiding contact with a less technologically advanced civilization to prevent disruption of that society's development. In a 1968 Star Trek episode, the directive was explicitly defined: "No identification of self or mission. No...

Interstellar distances seem to cry out for robotics and artificial intelligence. But as Nick Nielsen explains in the essay below, there is a compelling argument that our long-term goal should be human-crewed missions. We might ask whether the 'overview effect' that astronauts report from their experience of seeing the Earth from outside would have a counterpart on ever larger scales, including the galactic. In any case, what of 'tacit knowledge,' and that least understood faculty of human experience, consciousness? As always, Nielsen ranges widely in this piece, drawing on the philosophies of science and human experience to describe the value of an observing, embodied mind on the longest of all conceivable journeys. For more of Nick's explorations, see his Grand Strategy: The View from Oregon and Grand Strategy Annex. by J. N. Nielsen 0. A Scientific Argument for Human Exploration 1. The Human Condition in Outer Space 2. The Scientific Ellipsis of Tacit Knowledge 3. The...

I haven't yet read Kim Stanley Robinson's new novel Aurora (Orbit, 2015), though it's waiting on my Kindle. And a good thing, too, for this tale of a human expedition to Tau Ceti is turning out to be one of the most controversial books of the summer. The issues it explores are a touchstone for the widening debate about our future among the stars, if indeed there is to be one. Stephen Baxter does such a good job of introducing the issues and the authors of the essay below that I'll leave that to him, but I do want to note that Baxter's novel Ultima is just out (Roc, 2015) taking the interstellar tale begun in 2014's Proxima in expansive new directions. by Stephen Baxter, James Benford and Joseph Miller ‘Ever since they put us in this can, it’s been a case of get everything right or else everyone is dead . . .’ (Aurora Chapter 2) This essay is a follow-up to a review of Kim Stanley Robinson’s new novel Aurora by Gregory Benford, which critically examines the case that Robinson makes in...

The interstellar community has seen a surprising number of conferences since the 2011 event in Orlando, which kicked off the 100 Year Starship effort and brought unusual media attention to the idea of travel between the stars. I had thought when 2015 began that further conferences were unlikely -- it seemed to be a year for consolidation and, if you will, introspection, measuring how the effort to reach the public with deep space ideas was progressing and consolidating progress on various projects like the Icarus Interstellar starship redesign. But both Icarus and the 100 Year Starship organization have surprised me with conferences announced for this fall. Icarus pulled off a successful Starship Congress in 2013, one I remember with pleasure because of my son Miles' work with Icarus and the chance to meet up with him in Dallas to hear interesting papers and share news and good meals. There will doubtless be much to say about Project Icarus itself at the new meeting. After all, the...

Science fiction has always had its share of Earthside dystopias, but starflight's allure has persisted, despite the dark scrutiny of space travel in the works of writers like J. G. Ballard. But what happens if we develop the technologies to go to the stars and find the journey isn't worth it? Gregory Benford recently reviewed a novel that asks these questions and more, Kim Stanley Robinson's Aurora (Orbit Books, 2015). A society that reaches the Moon and then turns away from it may well prompt questions on how it would react to the first interstellar expedition. Benford, an award-winning novelist, has explored star travel in works like the six novels of the Galactic Center Saga and, most recently, in the tightly connected Bowl of Heaven and Shipstar. His review is a revised and greatly expanded version of an essay that first ran in Nature. by Gregory Benford Human starflight yawns as a vast prospect, one many think impossible. To arrive in a single lifetime demands high speeds...

If you're a long-time reader of this site, you doubtless share my fascination with the missions that are defining our summer -- Dawn at Ceres, Rosetta at comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, and in the coming week particularly, New Horizons at Pluto. But have you ever wondered why the fascination is there? Because get beyond the sustaining network of space professionals and enthusiasts and it's relatively routine to find the basic premise questioned. Human curiosity seems unquenchable but it's often under assault. 'Why spend millions on another space rock?' was the most recent question I've received to this effect, but beyond the economics, there's an underlying theme: Why leave one place to go to another, when soon enough you'll just want to go to still another place even more distant? The impulse to explore runs throughout human history, but it's shared at different levels of intensity within the population. I find that intriguing in itself and wonder how it plays out in past events....

Having written yesterday about the constellation of missions now returning data from deep space, I found Geoffrey Landis' essay "Spaceflight and Science Fiction" timely. The essay is freely available in the inaugural issue of The Journal of Astrosociology, the publication of the Astrosociology Research Institute (downloadable here). And while it covers some familiar ground -- Jules Verne's moon cannon, Frau im Monde, etc. -- it also highlights Landis' insights into the relationship between the space program and the genre that helped inspire it. My friend Al Jackson has written in various comments here (and in a number of back-channel emails) about Wernher von Braun's ideas and their relation to science fiction. As Landis notes, von Braun was himself a science fiction reader who credited an 1897 novel called Auf Zwei Planeten (Two Planets) by Kurd Lasswitz with inspiring his interest in rocketry. So, by the way, did Walter Hohmann, the German engineer who helped develop the area of...

Centauri Dreams regular Nick Nielsen here tackles transhumanism, probing its philosophical underpinnings and its practical consequences as civilization spreads outward from the Solar System. In a sense, transhumanism is what humans have always done, the act of transcendence through technology being a continuing theme of our existence. But accelerating technologies demand answers about human freedom in the context of a species that will inevitably bifurcate as it takes to the stars. Think of the 'Cambrian explosion' as a model as we consider what is to come. The author's philosophy often takes him into mathematics (hence a digression on Georg Cantor and set theory), but the prolific Nielsen (Grand Strategy: The View from Oregon and Grand Strategy Annex) always has the long result in mind, a human future that grows and changes with us in a galactic diaspora and beyond. by J. N. Nielsen 0. Introduction: Synchronic and Diachronic Historiography 1. Planetary Constraints upon Civilization...

The Nexus for Exoplanet System Science, or NExSS, is a collaborative initiative from NASA to draw on the collective talent of researchers from ten universities, three NASA centers and two research institutes. Conceived as a 'virtual institute,' the effort is both geographically diverse and multidisciplinary in nature, focusing not only on the search for exoplanets but the attempt to analyze planetary environments and find life. Jim Green, NASA's Director of Planetary Science, explains the concept: "This interdisciplinary endeavor connects top research teams and provides a synthesized approach in the search for planets with the greatest potential for signs of life. The hunt for exoplanets is not only a priority for astronomers, it's of keen interest to planetary and climate scientists as well." NExSS draws on the collective expertise of its participants in the areas of Earth science, planetary science within our Solar System, heliophysics and astrophysics to create what NASA is...

The latest imagery from New Horizons has me wondering what it must be like to be on the team for this mission. Although released a week ago, the photo at left was taken by the Ralph color imager aboard the spacecraft on April 9. The distance from Pluto and Charon in the shot is about 115 million kilometers. This is the first color image ever made of Pluto/Charon by an approaching spacecraft, one that gives us a sense of what lies ahead as the distance continues to diminish. Imagine being part of this long effort and seeing a new world and its system of moons swimming into focus, unveiling landscapes never before seen. New Horizons takes me back to the Voyager days, and in the context of the approach to Pluto/Charon, the publication of Jim Bell's The Interstellar Age (Dutton, 2015) is truly apropos (I'm sure the publishers had exactly this in mind). Subtitled "Inside the Forty-Year Voyager Mission," the book lets us glimpse what it was like inside JPL when the planetary encounters...

I like the theme of the just announced 2016 iteration of the Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop. Set in Chattanooga, TN, the meeting will convene at a local landmark, the Chattanooga Choo-Choo Hotel, which is actually built around the old railroad station made famous in the Glenn Miller tune of the same name. What better way to describe the upcoming event than what the group has chosen: "From Iron Horse to Worldship: Becoming an Interstellar Civilization." The Chattanooga event follows two previous meetings in Oak Ridge and one in Huntsville, AL, all of which I've had the pleasure of attending. The level of engagement I've found at TVIW has made all the meetings a success, beginning with the first, in Oak Ridge, back in 2011. That one sticks in my mind because of the intense fog that hung over the mountains as I drove in the evening before. The discussions and presentations were stimulating throughout, with an emphasis on more engagement with audience members than in a formal...

A couple of interesting posts to talk about in relation to yesterday's essay on the Encyclopedia Galactica. At UC-Santa Cruz, Greg Laughlin writes entertainingly about The Machine Epoch, an idea that suggested itself because of the spam his systemic site continually draws from "robots, harvesters, spamdexing scripts, and viral entities," all of which continually fill up his site's activity logs as they try to insert links. Anyone who attempts any kind of online publishing knows exactly what Laughlin is talking about, and while I hate to see his attention drawn even momentarily from his ongoing work, I always appreciate his insights on systemic, a blog whose range includes his exoplanet analyses as well as his speculations on the far future (as I mentioned yesterday, Laughlin and Fred Adams are the authors behind the 1999 title The Five Ages of the Universe, as mind-bending an exercise in extrapolating the future as anything I have ever read). I've learned on systemic that he can take...

One of the reasons I do what I do is that when I was a boy, I read Poul Anderson's The Enemy Stars. Published as a novel in 1959, the work made its original appearance the previous year in John Campbell's Astounding Science Fiction as a two-part serial titled "We Have Fed Our Sea." The reference is to Kipling's poem "The Song of the Dead," from which we read: We have fed our sea for a thousand years And she calls us, still unfed. Though there's never a wave of all her waves But marks our English dead... Space was, for Anderson, the new sea, one whose imperatives justify the sacrifices we make to conquer her, and "We Have Fed Our Sea" is a far better title for this work than its book version. Kipling writes: We were dreamers, dreaming greatly, in the man-stifled town; We yearned beyond the sky-line where the strange roads go down. Came the Whisper, came the Vision, came the Power with the Need... I bought The Enemy Stars at the Kroch's and Brentano's bookstore on S. Wabash Avenue in...

What does it take to imagine a human future among the stars? Donald Goldsmith asks the question in a recent op-ed for Space.com called Does Humanity's Destiny Lie in Interstellar Space Travel, playing off the tension between successful robotic exploration that has taken us beyond the heliosphere and the human impulse for personal experience of space. Along the way he looks at options for star travel both fast (wormholes) and slow (nuclear pulse, or Orion). A fine science writer who worked with Neil deGrasse Tyson on Origins: Fourteen Billion Years of Cosmic Evolution, Goldsmith nails several key issues. The successes of robotic exploration are obvious, and we're in the midst of several more energizing episodes -- the arrival of Dawn at Ceres and the approach of New Horizons to Pluto/Charon, as well as the recent cometary exploits of Rosetta. We have much to look forward to and, as mentioned yesterday, new impetus has arisen for the Europa Clipper mission, which would constitute a...

Can a universal library exist, once that contains all possible books? Centauri Dreams regular Nick Nielsen takes that as just the starting point in his latest essay, which tracks through Borges’ memorable thoughts on the matter to Carl Sagan, who brought the idea of an Encyclopedia Galactica to a broad audience. But are the two libraries one and the same? Nielsen takes the longest possible view of time, exploring a remote futurity beyond the Stelliferous era, to ask when an Encyclopedia Galactica would ever be complete, and who, when civilizations as we know them have ceased to exist, would evolve to read them. If Freeman Dyson’s conception of ‘eternal intelligence’ intrigues you, read on to see how it might emerge. Nielsen authors two blogs of his own, Grand Strategy: The View from Oregon and Grand Strategy Annex, in which a philosophical take on the human future is always at play, but perhaps never so strikingly as in this essay on intellect and its potential to survive. J. N....

There are a lot of things that could prevent our species from expanding off-Earth and gradually spreading into the cosmos. Inertia is one of them. If enough people choose not to look past their own lifetimes as the basis for action, we're that much less likely to think in terms of projects that will surely be multi-generational. That outcome doesn't worry me overly much because it flies against the historical record. We have abundant evidence of long-term projects built by civilizations for their own purposes, and while we view pyramids or cathedrals differently than they did in their time, their artifacts show that humans are capable of this impulse. The Dutch dike system has been maintained for over 500 years, and precursor activity can be traced back as far as the 9th Century. Nor am I concerned that most people won't ever want to leave this planet. I have no ambition to leave it either, but in every era there have been small numbers of people who chose to leave what they knew to...