Centauri Dreams regular James Jason Wentworth wrote recently with some musings about Bracewell probes, proposed by Ronald Bracewell in a 1960 paper. Bracewell conceived the idea of autonomous craft that could monitor developments in a distant solar system, perhaps...
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Transhumanism and Adaptive Radiation
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...
Ganymede Bulge: Evidence for Its Ocean?
What to make of the latest news about Ganymede, which seems to have a bulge of considerable size on its equator? William McKinnon (Washington University, St. Louis) and Paul Schenk (Lunar and Planetary Institute) have been examining old images of the Jovian moon taken...
The Search for ‘Chaotic Earths’
As we get the next generation of space-based telescopes into operation, one of our more significant problems is going to be knowing where to look. After all, once we've identified potentially interesting planets for follow-up with spectroscopic analysis of their...
The Fermi Question: No Paradox At All
We've talked often enough about the so-called 'Fermi paradox' in these pages, but Gregory Benford recently passed along a new paper from Robert H. Gray making the case that there is in fact no paradox, and that Fermi's intentions have been misunderstood. It's an...
Astrobiology: A Cautionary Tale
We're discovering planets around other stars at such a clip that moving to the next step -- studying their atmospheres for markers of life -- has become a priority. But what techniques will we use and, more to the point, how certain can we be of their results?...
Who Will Read the Encyclopedia Galactica?
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...
Titan: Polar Weather in Flux
Curiosities like the unusual feature in Ligeia Mare we discussed yesterday emphasize how important it is to have a long-term platform from which to study a planetary surface. If we are looking at something related to seasonal change on Titan, we have to remember that...
Habitable Moons: Background and Prospects
While I'm in Houston attending the 100 Year Starship Symposium (about which more next week), Andrew LePage has the floor. A physicist and freelance writer specializing in astronomy and the history of spaceflight, LePage will be joining us on a regular basis to provide...
What Io Can Teach Us
Io doesn't come into play very much on Centauri Dreams, probably because of the high astrobiological interest in the other Galilean satellites of Jupiter -- Europa, Callisto and Ganymede -- each of which may have an internal ocean and one, Europa, a surface that...