I'm just back from the Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop in Oak Ridge, having made it through the Smokies on a rainy, chilly night that saw fog along the ridges and often down in the valleys. It was a haunting drive in ways, the low ceilings making for slow driving and the sense of being surrounded by unseen peaks and deep gorges that were always just out of view. I had hoped to meet with Les Johnson and Robert Kennedy at the latter's house for the pre-conference festivities, but arrived too late and worn out to do anything but get to sleep. The workshop was an intense, one-day affair (a good thing I got that sleep!) that started at 8:00 the next day and concluded about 10:40 that night, and judging from the discussion at the end, it will become a regular event. It was great to see old friends. Les and I last talked at Aosta two years ago. Claudio Maccone had come from Italy and would be lecturing at Oak Ridge National Laboratory on the Karhunen-Loève transform the following day...

Wednesday is a travel day for me, and one with little chance to do any posting here. I'll leave you, then, with a quotation, and get back to normal posting tomorrow. Interstellar travel is incredibly difficult, perhaps as difficult to us today as a flight to Mars would have appeared to Christopher Columbus or other would-be transoceanic navigators 500 years ago. Indeed, the ratio of the distance from Earth to Mars compared to Columbus' voyage from Spain to the Caribbean -- 80,000:1 -- is roughly the same as the ratio of the distance to Alpha Centauri compared to a trip to Mars. Thus, the key missions required to establish humanity successively as a Type I, Type II, and Type III civilization all stand in similar relation to each other, and if the 500 years since Columbus have sufficed to multiply human capabilities to the point where we now can reach for Mars, so a similar span into the future might be expected to prepare us for the leap to the stars. Actually, it should not take so...

Kelvin Long and Richard Osborne have seen to it that the British Interplanetary Society's conference on the highly influential science fiction writer and philosopher Olaf Stapledon has gone off without a hitch. Here is their report from the event, a conference evidently as rife with speculation and far-future musings as anything the author himself ever penned. by K.F. Long & R. Osborne, Symposium Chairmen During the summer the British Interplanetary Society (BIS) played host to a symposium on World Ships, possibly the first such dedicated conference ever on these grand, long-term planning concepts. However, the most recent BIS symposium is on a topic that covers eons. There was no one who thought bigger and over longer timescales than the philosopher and writer Olaf Stapledon. Once again, the BIS has organized another first in history. On the 23rd of November members and visitors gathered to discuss the philosophy and literature of Stapledon in the context of today's current space...

Science fiction has been much on my mind of late, particularly following the 100 Year Starship Symposium, where so many of the scientists I talked to mentioned novels and movies that had been influential in getting them into science. My friend Keith Cooper, editor of Astronomy Now and a fine science writer whose work I often cite in these pages, also shares an interest in SF, and it was natural enough that we fell into a conversation by email on how the genre relates to interstellar studies. Because while we would expect a natural synergy between science and science fiction, the genre's cinematic and literary treatments are often at variance with each other. Why is this, and why are some elements of the interstellar idea easier to explore in writing than in film? Here are some thoughts (and memories) about science fiction's role. Paul Gilster Keith, you and I are both science fiction readers, although I'm enough old that I grew up in the heyday of Heinlein and all those great books...

What next for the 100 Year Starship Study? NASA and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency will make the call, as Tau Zero founder Marc Millis told Alan Boyle in his recent interview. To talk to Boyle, Millis donned virtual garb and appeared in Second Life in robotic form, but the interview is now available as a podcast on BlogTalkRadio and iTunes. I'll send you there for the discussion in full, but do note that Boyle talked to Millis about starflight before the show and has made an edited transcript of that conversation available on Cosmic Log. The quotes I use below are from the earlier talk, but do pick up the podcast and listen to the whole thing. Where DARPA goes next is to make a decision about awarding the funds remaining from the $1 million originally put into the project. About $500,000 is available, and Centauri Dreams speculates that DARPA will be more than happy to allocate the funds and be done with them, thus removing 'starship funding' from a budget always...