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...

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...