September 2012

I’m on my way to Houston for the 100 Year Starship symposium, and I should be airborne before this clicks into visibility through the wonders of automation. I’m involved in meetings all day Thursday and then into regular symposium activities for the rest of the weekend, about which I’ll be reporting next week and to [...]

Making Progress on Star Trek Physics is Marc Millis’ foray into crowdsourcing, a just announced project on Kickstarter. For those new to the concept, Kickstarter allows the general public to make donations to projects that are described on the site. A deadline is established and so is a minimum funding goal — if the goal [...]

Long journeys by spaceship are a staple of science fiction, but we know all too little about how to sustain a human habitat in a hostile environment. Experiments in closed ecosystems simply reveal how much work will have to go toward this subject before we can talk about moving out into the Solar System, much [...]

As we’ve had increasing reason to speculate, travel to the stars may not involve biological life forms but robotics and artificial intelligence. David Brin’s new novel Existence (Tor, 2012) cartwheels through many an interstellar travel scenario — including a biological option involving building the colonists upon arrival out of preserved genetic materials — but the [...]