Interstellar flight poses no shortage of ethical questions. How to proceed if an intelligent species is discovered is a classic. If the species is primitive in terms of technology, do we announce ourselves to it, or observe from a distance, following some version of...
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Probing the Likelihood of Panspermia
I’m looking at a paper just accepted at The Astrophysical Journal on the subject of panspermia, the notion that life may be distributed through the galaxy by everything from interstellar dust to comets and debris from planetary impacts. We have no hard data on this --...
A Statistical Look at Panspermia
Would panspermia, the idea that primitive life can spread from star to star, be theoretically observable? Henry Lin and Abraham Loeb (both associated with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) believe the answer is yes. In a paper accepted for publication...
Directed Panspermia: Seeding the Galaxy
Panspermia, the idea that life might travel through space to seed other planets and even other star systems, is a fascinating topic for conjecture, and our understanding of the survival of various forms of life in extreme environments only adds to its appeal. But just...
The Odds on Interstellar Panspermia
Our recent look at panspermia concepts was largely devoted to the transmission of life via microbes or spores here in our own Solar System. The even richer question of how life might pass from star to star is far more problematic, but as a follow-up to that earlier...
Can an Interstellar Generation Ship Maintain a Population on a 250-year Trip to a Habitable Exoplanet?
I grew up on generation ship stories. I'm thinking of tales like Heinlein's Orphans of the Sky, Aldiss' Non-Stop, and (from my collection of old science fiction magazines) Don Wilcox's "The Voyage that Lasted 600 Years." The latter, from 1940, may have been the first...
The Ethics of Spreading Life in the Cosmos
We keep trying to extend our reach into the heavens, but the idea of panspermia is that the heavens are actually responsible for us. Which is to say, that at least the precursor materials that allow life to emerge came from elsewhere, and did not originate on Earth....
Quantifying the Centauri Stream
The timescales we talk about on Centauri Dreams always catch up with me in amusing ways. As in a new paper out of Western University (London, Ontario), in which astrophysicists Cole Gregg and Paul Wiegert discuss the movement of materials from Alpha Centauri into...
Star Harvest: Civilizations in Search of Energy
Living a long time forces decisions that could otherwise be ignored. This is true of individuals as well as societies, but let’s think in terms of the individual human being. Getting older creates survival scenarios as simple as ensuring safety and nutrition for the...
An Incoming ‘Stream’ from Alpha Centauri?
Here’s an interesting thought. We know that at least two objects from outside our Solar System have appeared in our skies, the comet 2I/Borisov and the still enigmatic object called ‘Oumuamua. Most attention on these visitors has focused on their composition and the...