Larry Klaes loves science fiction movies. Those of you who have read his deep dives into such films as Forbidden Planet, Avatar or The Thing from Another World can understand why I think of Larry as the Robert Osborne of the SF movie (if you don't know who Robert...
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“An Intellectual Carrot – The Mind Boggles!” Dissecting The Thing from Another World
Centauri Dreams' resident movie critic turns his attention to a personal favorite from the canon of science fiction films. My own memories of The Thing from Another World go back to late Saturday night black-and-white TV, where I first saw the chilling tale as a boy....
‘Dark Star’ and Staring into the Cosmic Abyss
Most of us fortunate enough to see 2001: A Space Odyssey in a theater when it was released never dreamed it would spawn a strange 'twin.' But as Larry Klaes explains in the essay that follows, Dark Star was to emerge as a telling satire on the themes of the Kubrick...
Project Blue: Looking for Terrestrial Worlds at Alpha Centauri
Eduardo Bendek's ACEsat, conceived at NASA Ames by Bendek and Ruslan Belikov, seemed to change the paradigm for planet discovery around the nearest stellar system. The beauty of Alpha Centauri is that the two primary stars present large habitable zones as seen from...
Creating Our Own Final Frontier: Part Two
In which Larry Klaes concludes his analysis of Forbidden Planet, the still revered science fiction classic from the 1950s. If you ever had any questions about this film, Larry is your man, and note the full complement of online resources at the end of the essay. by...
Jupiter in the Public Eye
Have a look at Jupiter as seen by the Juno spacecraft on its third close pass. A view as complex as the one below reminds us how images can be manipulated to bring out detail. This happens so frequently in astronomical images that it's easy to forget this view is not...
Project Blue: Imaging Alpha Centauri Planets
We know about an extremely interesting planet around Proxima Centauri, and there are even plans afoot (Breakthrough Starshot) to get probes into the Alpha Centauri system later in this century. But last April, when Breakthrough Initiatives held a conference at...
A Renewed Look at Boyajian’s Star
It was inevitable that KIC 8462852 would spawn a nickname, given the public attention given to this mystifying star, whose unusual lightcurves continue to challenge us. 'Tabby's Star' is the moniker I've seen most frequently, but we now seem to be settling in on...
Extraterrestrial First Contact in Space Protocols
As we move into the outer Solar System and beyond, the possibility exists that we may encounter an extraterrestrial species engaged in similar exploration. How we approach first contact has been a theme of science fiction for many years (Murray Leinster's 1945 story...
Closing Out 100YSS: Antimatter, Gravitational Lensing & a Modified Orion
I don't envy the track chairs at any conference, particularly conferences that are all about getting large numbers of scientists into the right place at the right time. Herding cats? But the track model makes inherent sense when you're dealing with widely disparate...