In the 1950s, Arthur C. Clarke's fame had begun to spread, and he sometimes referred to himself, genially enough, as an 'unemployed prophet.' This is a period in Clarke's career that, from 1953 to 1956, saw the emergence of the fifteen tall tales that would be...
Search Results:
Voyager: Looking Backward and Forward
The Voyager spacecraft have run into their share of problems as they move toward true interstellar space, but on the whole their continued operations have been a testament to what well designed equipment can do. Voyager 2's camera platform locked for a time not long...
Biological Evolution in Interstellar Human Migration
Centauri Dreams is happy to welcome Dr. Cameron M. Smith, a prehistorian at Portland State University's Department of Anthropology in Portland, OR, with an essay that is the capstone of this week's worldship theme. Dr. Smith began his career excavating...
Into Europa’s Ocean
Europa continues to fascinate us with the possibility of a global ocean some 100 kilometers deep, a vast body containing two to three times the volume of all the liquid water on Earth. The big question has always been how thick the icy crust over this ocean might be,...
Starships of the Mind
Michael Michaud wrote the essay that follows back in 1978 for a now-defunct magazine that never published it. In recent correspondence about Daedalus designer Alan Bond, Michael referred to the essay and I asked him to forward a copy, which had also passed through the...
The Velocity of Thought
How fast we go affects how we perceive time. That lesson was implicit in the mathematics of Special Relativity, but at the speed most of us live our lives, easily describable in Newtonian terms, we could hardly recognize it. Get going at a substantial percentage of...
The Last Pictures: Contemporary Pessimism and Hope for the Future
Sending messages into the galaxy normally goes under the rubric of METI - Messaging to Extraterrestrial Intelligence. In its electromagnetic form, the sending of directed signals to nearby star systems, it has proven more than a little controversial, as the work of...
Conceiving the Laser-Fusion Starship
When young Rod Hyde, fresh out of MIT, started working on starship design in mid-1972, there were not many fusion-based precedents for what he was up to. He had taken a summer job that would turn into a career at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, but right off...
Swansong Earth: Refuges for Life
As we begin to identify planets in the habitable zone of their stars, the larger issue becomes what fraction of stars have such planets. This is eta-Earth (?Earth), the percentage of Sun-like stars with Earth-like planets in the habitable zone, a figure we can...
Musings on Solitude and Contact
Back in 2007, science writer Lee Billings put together a panel for Seed Media Group on "The Future of the Vision for Space Exploration." The session took place at the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill, and I remember flying to Washington with a bad head...