Search: meti

Starship Musings: Warping to the Stars

May 2, 2013

by Kelvin F.Long The executive director of the Institute for Interstellar Studies here gives us his thoughts on Star Trek and the designing of starships, with special reference to Enrico Fermi. Kelvin is also Chief Editor for the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, whose latest conference is coming up. You’ll find a poster for [...]

Read the full article →

Robotic Replicators

April 26, 2013

Centauri Dreams regular Keith Cooper gives us a look at self-replication and the consequences of autonomous probes for intelligent cultures spreading into the universe. Is the Fermi paradox explained by the lack of such civilizations in the galaxy, or is there a far more subtle reason? Keith has been thinking about these matters for some [...]

Read the full article →

Clarke: The Rocket Man Emerges

April 3, 2013

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 published in 1957 as Tales from the White Hart, [...]

Read the full article →

The British Interplanetary Society at 80 Years: Part II

March 25, 2013

by Kelvin F. Long The chief editor of the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society here offers part II of his article on the Society’s history. If there is one BIS project that captures the imagination above all others, it’s surely Project Daedalus, the ambitious attempt to design a spacecraft capable of reaching a nearby [...]

Read the full article →

Biological Evolution in Interstellar Human Migration

March 15, 2013

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 million-year-old stone tools in Africa and today combines his archaeological interests with a consideration of [...]

Read the full article →

Bostrom: From Extinction to Transcendence

February 27, 2013

At the top of my list of people I’d someday like to have a long conversation with is Nick Bostrom, a philosopher and director of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute. As Centauri Dreams readers will likely know, Bostrom has been thinking about the issue of human extinction for a long time, his ideas playing interestingly [...]

Read the full article →

Starships of the Mind

February 22, 2013

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 hands of Freeman Dyson and Bob Forward not long after [...]

Read the full article →

Interstellar Studies: Surveying the Landscape

February 12, 2013

One of the things I love about writing Centauri Dreams is that I learn something new every day. Often this comes from the research needed for individual stories, but just as often it comes from readers suggesting new directions or seeing nuances in an earlier story that I had missed. Yesterday’s post on long-term thinking [...]

Read the full article →

New Book Recalls “Men Into Space”

February 1, 2013

These days we know that perhaps a million objects the size of the Tunguska impactor or larger are moving through nearby space, and talk of how to deflect asteroids has become routine. Given our increasing awareness of near-Earth objects, it wouldn’t be a surprise to hear of a new Hollywood treatment involving an Earth-threatening asteroid. [...]

Read the full article →

Data Storage: The DNA Option

January 28, 2013

One of the benefits of constantly proliferating information is that we’re getting better and better at storing lots of stuff in small spaces. I love the fact that when I travel, I can carry hundreds of books with me on my Kindle, and to those who say you can only read one book at a [...]

Read the full article →

← Previous Entries