Best holiday wishes to all from Centauri Dreams. I’m now going on an abbreviated schedule, with no post today or on Monday. I’ll follow the same pattern next week as we close in on the New Year. The next regular post, then, will appear Tuesday December 27, and we’ll see what interesting news items accumulate between now and then. Let me also add thanks to the entire readership for high-quality comments all through 2011 that have focused our discussions and opened up new insights on interstellar topics. Here’s to holiday cheer, good companionship and breakthrough ideas.



Merry Holidays to you, too, Paul! I find the comments to your posts as interesting as your writings and agree that there are some very good discussions sparked from them. I wish I had a better understanding of physics and engineering to be able to contribute to the discussions in an intelligent way, but those are not my fields of expertise. I’m just an interested citizen who deeply wishes to get a real space program – along with all the accompanying technology – going full speed ahead.
Happy Christmas, Paul and everybody.
I only discovered this blog six months ago, in fact because it was a place to find information about 100YSS.
Thanks for maintaining this blog, and all the very interesting ideas that were discussed here since years.
Jean-Pierre
Enjoy your holidays Paul. I hope Santa is good to you and you get a FTL drive for Christmas. Then you can really take a holiday cruise in the New Year! Be sure to send postcards.
Wishing everyone happy holidays and thanks again Paul for a great blog.
Merry Christmas Paul, and thanks for all the hard work on this blog.
Have a good one Paul!
Merry Christmas, Paul, and keep the outstanding reports coming in the New Year and beyond!
Thanks for keeping up the good work Paul, wishing you all the best for the 2012.
Cheers, Paul.
To all: happy solstice, a felicitous perihelion, and all the best during the next orbit!
Happy Cristmass to everyboddy and especially to Paul .Whithout his maintaining this blog , our centauri dreams would be homeless .
Merry Christmas! And thank you for keeping the small light of interstellar dreams alive!
Happy Christmas to all of you and above all to you Paul, keep up the good and valuable work in the new year.
And may we find a another earthlike planet in the new year, preferably one near Alpha Centauri.
Merry Christmas all, and special thanks to Paul for this wonderful site. I hope that somehow we all manage to cope with the ill timing of all this traditional feasting and drinking. Djlactin is right, Earth’s insolation is approaching its maximum, and most of us on Earth are baking in the heat!
Another example of scientific crowd-sourcing, here getting the public to look for evidence of alien structures on photos taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/dec/25/scour-moon-ancient-traces-aliens
There is also a link to the original Davies and Wagner paper.