by Paul Gilster | Oct 17, 2013 | Exoplanetary Science |
The recent question raised here about conditions on a white dwarf planet provides a segue to the white dwarf GD 61 and the interesting results reported by astronomers at the Universities of Cambridge and Warwick. Relying on data from Hubble as well as Keck I and Keck II and NASA’s FUSE telescope, the researchers have analyzed what they believe to be evidence for an asteroid or minor planet that once contained large amounts of water around the star. The water-rich object would have been knocked out of its orbit and subsequently shredded by by the star’s gravitational force.
Image: Artist impression of a rocky and water-rich asteroid being torn apart by the strong gravity of the white dwarf star GD 61. Similar objects in the Solar System likely delivered the bulk of water on Earth and represent the building blocks of the terrestrial planets. Credit & Copyright: Mark A. Garlick, Space-Art.co.uk/University of Warwick/University of Cambridge.
GD 61 is some 150 light years from us, but spectrographic observations with the Keck instruments have made it possible to detect the basic ingredients of the disrupted material surrounding the white dwarf. Magnesium, silicon and iron show up in the star’s contaminated atmosphere, but so does significantly more oxygen than would flag the presence of rocky materials alone. Hubble’s Cosmic Origins Spectrograph is the key instrument in this finding. Boris Boris Gänsicke (University of Warwick) explains the significance of the oxygen levels:
“This oxygen excess can be carried by either water or carbon, and in this star there is virtually no carbon – indicating there must have been substantial water… This also rules out comets, which are rich in both water and carbon compounds, so we knew we were looking at a rocky asteroid with substantial water content – perhaps in the form of subsurface ice – like the asteroids we know in our Solar System such as Ceres.”
Substantial is the word, for the researchers believe the asteroid would have contained about 26 percent water mass, which is indeed similar to Ceres. The Earth, by comparison, has only 0.023 percent of its mass as surface water, an indication that our oceans were delivered by water-rich asteroids or comets long after the planet formed. Jay Farihi (Cambridge Institute of Astronomy) is quoted in this Keck Observatory news release:
“The finding of water in a large asteroid means the building blocks of habitable planets existed – and maybe still exist – in the GD 61 system, and likely also around a substantial number of similar parent stars. These water-rich building blocks, and the terrestrial planets they build, may in fact be common – a system cannot create things as big as asteroids and avoid building planets, and GD 61 had the ingredients to deliver lots of water to their surfaces. Our results demonstrate that there was definitely potential for habitable planets in this exoplanetary system.”
Before becoming a white dwarf, GD 61 was about three times more massive than the Sun, and the research team believes the detected water came from a minor planet at least 90 kilometers in diameter but probably larger, one that would have been orbiting the star before it became a white dwarf some 200 million years ago. The mass estimate is conservative because the observations can only detect what has been swallowed by the star in recent history.
The scientists also speculate that it would have taken the presence of one or more giant planets to perturb an asteroid orbit enough to send it inwards toward the star, a mechanism for continual pollution of the white dwarf’s atmosphere. We may be looking at something like what our own Solar System will look like in another five or six billion years, a scene future astronomers could likewise use to reconstruct the presence of terrestrial and gas giant planets. According to this University of Warwick news release, twelve destroyed exoplanets orbiting white dwarfs have been studied, but the GD 61 work marks the first time that evidence for water has been found.
The paper is Farihi et al., “Evidence for Water in the Rocky Debris of a Disrupted Extrasolar Minor Planet,” Science Vol. 342, No. 6155 (11 October 2013), pp. 218-220 (abstract).
by Paul Gilster | Oct 16, 2013 | Outer Solar System |
Before getting into the distant regions near Pluto/Charon, let’s pause for a moment with a reflection on speed. New Horizons left Earth orbit traveling faster than any other vehicle launched into interplanetary space, although it has since slowed. Now the Juno mission is getting press for its velocity, perhaps impelled by this quote from Bill Knuth (University of Iowa), who is lead investigator for one of the probe’s nine scientific instruments. Of Juno’s recent close approach to Earth, Knuth says:
“Juno will be really smoking as it passes Earth at a speed of about 25 miles per second relative to the Sun. But it will need every bit of this speed to get to Jupiter for its July 4, 2016, capture into polar orbit about Jupiter. The first half of its journey has been simply to set up this gravity assist with Earth.”
The speed is impressive, about 40 kilometers per second, and far above Voyager 1’s 17.1 kilometers per second, as well as New Horizons’ expected 14 kilometers per second at the Pluto/Charon flyby in 2015 — after its sizzling departure, New Horizons has been slowing as it climbs out of the Sun’s gravity well. Juno has been pegged in some press reports as ‘the fastest man-made object ever,’ but its 40 kilometers per second doesn’t stand up to the two Helios probes, launched like Voyager back in the 1970s, which actually claim that title at 70 kilometers per second. Keep your eyes on the upcoming Solar Probe Plus for even faster velocities.
Amidst the Plutonian Moons
But back to Pluto/Charon, as I catch up with news from the AAS Division for Planetary Sciences meeting earlier this month in Denver. One of the curiosities about Pluto as we’ve discovered new moons there is their arrangement. Charon is the nearest and by far the largest moon, but what we see in the others is a steady succession that varies with Charon’s own orbital period. Thus Styx, Nix, Kereberos and Hydra present us with orbital periods that are 3, 4, 5 and 6 times longer than Charon’s own. That flies in the face of current models of formation of such moons, a situation that, according to Southwest Research Institute scientist Hal Levison, “suggests that we have been missing some important mechanism to transport material around in this system.”
Image: A Hubble image of Pluto and its moons that has been modified by replacing “P4” and “P5” with the newer designations “Kerberos” and “Styx” respectively. Credit: NASA/Wikimedia Commons.
The SwRI study, described in this news release, modeled Charon itself by assuming a large impact in the early system, with additional moons built out of debris from this and other presumed collisions. Charon is fully one-tenth the mass of Pluto (by comparison, the Moon is 1/81 the mass of Earth), and its effect on early moon formation would be profound. Small moons that approached it would be flung outward while other small moons would collide, a series of early catastrophes that would lead to moon-building materials being pushed outward.
“The implications for this result are that the current small satellites are the last generation of many previous generations of satellites,” said Dr. Kevin Walsh, another investigator and a research scientist in SwRI’s Planetary Science Directorate at Boulder, Colo. “They were probably first formed around 4 billion years ago, and after an eventful million years of breaking and rebuilding, have survived in their current configuration ever since.”
All of which leads me to the New Horizons Message Initiative that was first announced at the 100 Year Starship Symposium in Houston not long ago. If you haven’t signed the NHMI petition yet, please visit the site and do so. The plan is to reconfigure a small portion of New Horizons’ computer memory, once its mission has been accomplished at Pluto/Charon and any Kuiper Belt objects beyond, so we can upload a message from humanity that will be crowd-sourced from all over the world. This is a private initiative and we need petition signatures to persuade NASA to consider this follow-up to the original Voyager ‘golden records.’ The NHMI is being developed through the capable work of Jon Lomberg and a team of volunteers. Lomberg’s work with Frank Drake in designing the cover for the Voyager records helped us gain perspective on our place in the cosmos as we reflected on what sights and sounds best represent our species.
by Paul Gilster | Oct 15, 2013 | Culture and Society |
Starship Century in London
A new Starship Century Symposium will be held at the Royal Astronomical Society, Piccadilly, UK on Monday October 21st. If I hadn’t exhausted my travel budget by September, I would definitely have this one on my agenda and follow it with a week or so in my favorite city. Here’s the information I have on the event from its organizers, James and Gregory Benford:
Starship Century addresses the challenges and opportunities for our long-term future in space, with possibilities envisioned by featured speaker Lord Martin Rees, Royal Astronomer, Ian Crawford, Birkbeck College, University of London, writer/scientist Stephen Baxter, James Benford, Microwave Sciences, and Gregory Benford, UC Irvine. Starship Century discusses the implications that these explorations might have upon our development as individuals and as a civilization.
Agenda
- 10 am Starship Century: Toward the Grandest Horizon James & Gregory Benford
- 10:30 Scientific Benefits of Starships Ian Crawford
- 11:30 Contact at Alpha Centauri Stephen Baxter
- 1 pm -Break for lunch-
- 2 pm To the Ends of the Universe Lord Martin Rees
- 3:30 Exploring Interstellar Space Panel with Lord Martin Rees, Ian Crawford, Stephen Baxter, Jim & Greg Benford, others TBA
- 5 pm Symposium ends.
Proceeds from the sale of the Starship Century book go toward interstellar studies. Admission to the event is free.
Project Icarus Workshop
Yet another reason to get to the UK is the latest from Project Icarus, the continuing effort by Icarus Interstellar to produce a fusion starship design growing out of the original Project Daedalus work in the 1970s. Here’s what I have on this one from the Icarus team:
Project Icarus is presenting the results of our preliminary fusion-rocket based interstellar spacecraft at the British Interplanetary Society in London on October 21 and 22nd, 2013.
We are asking for support in raising $2000 to support our volunteer researchers and students attending the workshop. All donations made to Icarus Interstellar through October will be channeled to support the “2013 Project Icarus Design Competition”. FOUR (4) breakway teams are presenting variations of spacecraft designs and mission configurations which will be presented during an internal workshop on the 21st, followed by a public symposium on the 22nd of October.
In appreciation of your support, donors will receive:
- $10 Your name listed in the acknowledgements of the final publication.
- $20 Icarus Interstellar Lapel Badge (and above)
- $50 Icarus Mug and t-Shirt (and above)
- $100 Advance copies of the INTERNAL Spacecraft Design studies (and above)
- $101 SPECIAL donations over $100 will receive an exclusive media pack containing HIGH RESOLUTION SPACECRAFT ENGINEERING DESIGNS rendered expertly by Adrian Mann (www.bisbos.com) (including all of the above!)
The exclusive content found in the INTERNAL Project Icarus Design Studies is the result of thousands of hours of research by our international volunteers. This is the FIRST TIME Icarus has shared full spacecraft designs. You can be among the exclusive few to explore our work first hand!
Icarus Interstellar the World’s Largest 501c(3) Deep Space and Interstellar Exploration Research Organization. All donations are tax exempt and deeply appreciated.
We are volunteers doing this work because it needs to be done.
Lets Build a Starship together!
White Dwarf Planets
My interest in planets around small stars is probably evident from the amount of space I spend on M-dwarfs and their planetary systems. Only recently have white dwarfs come into the picture for me, but as we’ve seen, Mukremin Kilic (University of Oklahoma) and colleagues have been discussing how to re-purpose the wounded Kepler observatory to look for transiting planets around such stars. About a year ago we also looked at Luca Fossati (The Open University, UK) and his work on the possibility of habitable white dwarf planets in exceedingly fortuitous orbits.
Now I have an email from science fiction writer Randy Blackwell, who has been working on a novel which raises interesting questions about habitable planets around white dwarf stars. Blackwell was looking for more details about possible conditions on the surface of such a world and I didn’t have the answers, so I thought it best to float his questions past the Centauri Dreams readership, many of whom have solved previous astronomical questions raised here.
Here’s Blackwell’s message about the scenario depicted in his novel:
The main characters find themselves on another planet. It is a water surface planet. The planet orbits a white dwarf. My complication is figuring out what the sky would look like by day and by night from the planet’s surface. Would there be an aura due to the great magnetism of the white dwarf? Would a dust trail be visible? If the desirable distance and size is 1 million miles at same size as Earth (both planet and dwarf) then what size would it look like in comparison to our Sun in the sky of the planet. Would it look closer or further? Would it be darker or more light with a 10 hour rotation?
I’m curious to see any answers to the questions Blackwell raises.
Image: A white dwarf as compared with the Earth. Credit: Ohio State University/Richard Pogge.
Deep Time in Aeon Magazine
A quick nod to Colin Dickey and his fine essay in Aeon Magazine on the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, which I actually encountered first in a post on the Long Now Foundation’s site. Looking at the lessons of geology and deep time, Dickey refuses to play the catastrophe card as a driver for long-haul projects like these. Calling the lessons of Svalbard “more complex than the simple, immediate apocalypse intimated by the hype surrounding the seed vault,” he goes on to say:
This recognition of the work of seed banks like the one in Svalbard is quotidian, bordering on the banal, and it can help to refocus an attitude towards the environment that sometimes verges on the self-important. A proper relationship to nature must involve a sense of stewardship, to be sure, and a willingness to work for a better tomorrow. But it might also do well to be stripped of a histrionic sense of perpetual catastrophe. Places such as Svalbard can help us to think on a much longer, deeper scale — one in which we are peripheral characters in a drama taking aeons to unfold.
In other words, a proper relationship between ourselves and the natural world is thoughtfully long-term whether or not global catastrophe ever forces us to rely on such repositories.
by Paul Gilster | Oct 14, 2013 | Culture and Society |
Space writer Neil McAleer’s long association with Arthur C. Clarke culminated in Visionary: The Odyssey of Arthur C. Clarke (Clarke Project, 2012). A gifted journalist whose work has appeared in numerous magazines and newspapers, McAleer is also the author of The Omni Space Almanac, which won the 1988 Robert S. Ball Award from the Aviation and Space Writers Association. Neil recently reminded me that a new book on Clarke was about to appear, and in the post that follows, he gives us an overview of a title in which Fred Clarke, Arthur’s brother, makes an informative contribution, along with a host of writers and other Clarke associates. The photos in Arthur C. Clarke: A Life Remembered are worth the price of admission, and I’ve reproduced a few of them below with permission. Neil breaks the review down by contributing author and explains what you can expect from each. Ordering information is at the end.
by Neil McAleer
Arthur C. Clarke: A Life Remembered
$22.95 plus shipping. ISBN 978-1926837-26-0
Authors in order of first appearance: Fred Clarke, Robert Godwin, Mark Stewart, and Kelvin F. Long (multi-contributor chapters follow the chapters from the four authors in this review)
Fred Clarke
Chapter I – Childhood: Vignettes by Fred Clarke (25 pp.)
If the Guinness World Records had a category for “Devoted Brothers,” Frederick William Clarke (1921-2013), the second born son of Nora and Charles Clarke, would have held the world record since the first edition in 1955. Even so, Fred Clarke was his own man and shared with his brother Arthur a unique individuality and vitality in life. I think of the wonderful quote from Joseph Campbell: “The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.”
Twenty-three (23) vignettes, all with titles, almost all humorous and positive anecdotes about growing up in Somerset England, introduce this accessible and many-peopled volume on the life and work of Arthur C. Clarke.
The lengths vary from 4 lines to 2 full pages—the longest including “Huish Grammar School” and “Star Gazing”; and the shortest, including “Cider Thieves!” and “Fred Enlists.”
Image: Arthur C. Clarke takes his first flight in an Avro 504. Nora Clarke is in the rear seat. Captain Percival Philips at the controls. Taunton circa 1927. Credit: BIS/Apogee Prime/Rocket Publishing. Published with permission.
Great, high-end quality black and white photographs, numbering 17, appear in this chapter, and their variety ranges from portraits of Arthur’s space cadet friends and colleagues to a special plaque, attached to the stone exterior of Arthur Clarke’s birthplace at 4 Blenheim Road in Minehead. (A total of 70 photographs in the book, with 2 tables on starships in fiction.)
Robert Godwin
Chapter II – Early Days: From Ego to Fame (46 pp.)
Rob Godwin’s important Chapter II is a substantial contribution to Clarke’s early life, and its coverage of 20 years (1934-54) represents one-fifth of the book’s entire text. Indeed, this accessible, readable text tends to cloak its original and hard-won research from an expert and publisher in the space sciences–a devoted writer who knows the joy of discovering new treasures of a well-lived life. This labor of love also required the skills of a genealogical sleuth—tracking down, contacting, and interviewing many descendants of key contemporary influences in Arthur Clarke’s life.
After Godwin’s fine history, gold nugget pieces of reality from the early days come forth to complete the chapter via the still lasting magic of print—a time machine from Arthur’s pen and from the pen of his good friend and fellow space cadet, Bill Temple. These are three pieces from the classic fanzine, Novae Terrae, dated June 1937 (Clarke, 3 pp.), June 1938 (Temple, 5 pp.), and January 1939 (Clarke, 3pp.). Read them. They will transport you back to a time when Arthur was 20 years old.
Image: Arthur C. Clarke in his study at Ballifants. Credit: BIS/Apogee Prime/Rocket Publishing.
Chapter XII — Beyond 2001: The Gala (13pp.)
And later on in the book, third to last chapter, Godwin’s dramatic and colorful account of the Arthur C. Clarke Gala at the Playboy Mansion overflows with his genuine enthusiasm and gratitude for actually being there and playing a part of moving some of the events along smoothly. This reviewer, who was also present that November night just weeks after the September 11 attack, was reminded how much he had forgotten in 12 years! But to this day, seeing the living Arthur C. Clarke, from a half world away, projected as a 3D hologram standing at a podium opposite Star Trek Commander Patrick Stewart, will never be forgotten.
Mark Stewart*
Chapter IV – The Clarke Legacy: An Interview with Fred Clarke (6 pp.)
Mark Stewart, editor of the online monthly Odyssey, meets the other brother, Fred Clarke, for the first time, when Fred is closing in on his 90th birthday. With summary narration and quotes, Stewart writes up Fred’s delightful anecdotes as only Fred Clarke can tell them, with good humor and optimism. The short tales do not overlap with those of the Fred’s first chapter.
* Mark was accompanied by BIS members Kelvin F. Long and Colin Philp.
Chapter V – Tales from Taprobane*: An Interview with Nalaka Gunawardene (11 pp.) in December 2010.** Nalaka’s interview’s timeline stretched from the latter half of the 1980s to Clarke’s death in March 2008. Nalaka handled all public relations and media work upon his death. As Clarke’s assistant of many hats, the stories and insights into life with Clarke and his work are fresh and insightful.
*In three parts, with this Gunawardene interview as part one—and the longest. All three parts share the place: Sri Lanka, aka Ceylon and Taprobane. The other two parts are: “Rendezvous with Arthur,” Michael Lennick (6 pp.); and “The Brightest Star,” Helen Sharman (2 pp.)
** Colin Philp was present at the Gunawardene interview held at BIS Headquarters in London.
Image: Arthur in his beloved Sri Lanka. Credit: BIS/Apogee Prime/Rocket Publishing.
Michael Lennick, the producer of a Discovery television documentary on the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, writes the second part of Chapter V about his visit and interview with Arthur in 2000. He was astounded that his draft came out to exactly 2001 words! Serendipity! He left it that way—not wanting to press his luck. (5.3 pp)
And part three was written by astronaut Helen Sharman. Her narrative tells of her visit to Sri Lanka to meet Arthur and promote her book, which began with a foreword by Clarke. Sharman was the first British woman in space, who flew to the Mir Space station in 1991.( 92pp.)
Chapter X – Interplanetary Men: Arthur Clarke and Olaf Stapledon — Cosmic Visionaries (6 pp.)
Mark Stewart writes about one of Arthur Clarke’s most profound and consequential early influences in his work, Olaf Stapledon, whose books include the long-lasting, relevant, and classic novels, Last and First Men and StarMaker. Many other contemporaries of Clarke, including his lifelong friend, Patrick Moore, were equally influenced by Stapledon. And how did these “Deep Time and Space” enthusiasts get the famous writer to the youthful British Interplanetary Society to give a lecture in post-WWII 1948? Bob Parkinson, then President of the BIS, told Stewart before a lecture one night: “Clarke and a few others just went to where he was living at the time, and knocked on his front door; they just asked him to do it! …That’s how we got him to speak.”
Clarke had the honor of introducing Stapleton to the audience that evening, and Stewart gives several rare and great quotes from the lecture in this piece. A must read for the “Deep Time and Space” cadets.
Chapter XIV – Fred Clarke (2 pp.)
Mark Stewart writes this piece about the rare and wonderful lifetime relationship between the Clarke brothers who are now together forever in “Deep Time.” This heartfelt tribute of the first order has a lasting power to anyone who met and knew Fred Clarke.
Chapter XV – Fictional Last Word (2pp.)
Stewart extends the power of his tribute to Fred Clarke by flashing forward from the tribute’s last paragraph to this short, fictional image tale of the two brothers once again together.
Kelvin F. Long
Chapter VIII – Old Spaceship (3 pp.)
This chapter is divided into three sections: “The Spaceship” (Kelvin Long) – “Blueprint for a Starship” (Stephen Baxter) – “Creating a Self-Fulfilling Prophesy in Space” (Kelvin Long). Two tables appear in the chapter, one covering ACC’s spaceships in his fiction and nonfiction work; the second covering starships in the works of other science fiction writers.
“The Spaceship” is an overview introduction to the relationship between spaceships in fiction and spaceships in advanced engineering design.
Stephen Baxter’s section, “Blueprint for a Starship,” (9 pp.) is a look at the interstellar starships of the Icarus/Daedalus class, which respectively represent an ongoing and previous program of studies from the membership and associates of the British Interplanetary Society. All starship concepts in these two research programs travel at some fraction of the speed of light and none reach it. Three sample starship concepts from the final page table in Baxter’s essay give the cruise speed of the Daedalus Project as 0.12 c; Clarke’s Magellan in Songs from Distant Earth as 0.2c; and the Venture Star in James Cameron’s Atavar as 0.7c – all as speed-of-light percentages. The Table on the concluding page of Baxter’s “Blueprint” gives the neophyte starship student an excellent perspective—including the keyed references, one of which cites Paul Gilster’s Centauri Dreams (Springer 2004) as an excellent source for starships in science fiction.
Long’s “Creating a Self-Fulfilling Prophesy . . .” (6 pp.) concludes the chapter with an inspirational narrative about the many and varied ways Arthur left his mark on several generations of future space farers—what I call, “Arthur Clarke’s Deep Legacy,” in both time and space. This includes Long’s own renewed enthusiasm from Clarke’s lifetime work as well as a commitment to the interstellar vision that Long works toward, what Paul Gilster (whom I dub the “Master of the Deep”) named his book and website for — Centauri Dreams. But Long puts reality into his renewed vision by organizing the new interstellar research effort he names Project Icarus. “Where Project Daedalus showed that interstellar travel was possible in theory (proof of an existence theorem), Project Icarus aims to demonstrate it is theoretically possible in practice, not by building the vehicle but by demonstrating that the design is sufficiently credible and possible in the near-term.” And the Project Icarus mission also must fire up future generations of interstellar experts as they move into Deep Space and Time to reach new worlds.
Image: Clarke’s ‘The Sentinel’ as it appeared on the cover of New Worlds in 1954. Credit: Michael Moorcock.
Chapter XI – Before the Odyssey (6 pp.)
Kelvin Long compliments Mark Stewart’s chapter X, Interplanetary Men, by covering other early literary influences in Clarke’s youth. His primary focus is on David Lasser and his classic 1931 nonfiction book, The Conquest of Space, which describes the practical applications and future prospects for humankind of rockets and rocketry. He quotes Clarke on its importance to him at the age of 14.
——-
NOTE: Front and back matter, plus multi-contributor chapters now follow. All chapters by the four primary authors have been summarized, in order of appearance, prior to this note.
——-
Front Matter Overview – Acknowledgements by the four authors. Preface by Gregory Benford: “Remembering Arthur” (3 pp.). Benford’s upfront essay joins the large starship crew of admirers and personal friends who carry forth Clarke’s lifelong desire to reach other star’s and their worlds of sentient beings; Preface, by the four authors who man the bridge of the good starship, Arthur C. Clarke, which carries the legacy of his vision to future reality. Special Introduction by Angie Edwards, Fred Clarke’s daughter and Board Member of the Arthur C. Clarke Foundation. “This is the first truly personal memoir of my Uncle Arthur. . . .”
Back Matter Overview. Resources and Recommended Reading; Selected Papers by Arthur C. Clarke, covering 43 years,1938 to 1981. About the Authors, who take the helm of the Good starship Arthur C. Clarke.
Chapter III – Friends and Followers (10 pp.)
This chapter, short and sweet, has reminiscences of 5 friends who knew Clarke over long periods of time. They are, in order of appearance, Fred Ordway (met in 1950); Michael Moorcock (met in early 1960s); Ben Bova (met in 1956); Keir Dullea (met in late 1965), and writer Robert J. Sawyer (who met ACC only through his work–he read 2001: A Space Odyssey when he was 11, in 1971, but saw the movie when he was only 8, in 1968.
For the “general reader,” who might not be familiar with one or more of these five space cadets, there is a succinct mini-bio is at the end of each piece.
Chapter VI – Remembering Arthur: Members of the British Interplanetary Society Reminisce (12 pp.)
Seven members of the BIS tell their personal tales and connections to Arthur Clarke. In order of appearance they are:
- Martin Fry (Chair of the Space 82 BIS Conference in Brighton who interviewed Clarke via satellite link)
- David A. Hardy (Studied sciences at the College of Technology in Birmingham and met Arthur Clarke when he lectured there for the BIS in the early 50s)
- Mat Irving (The great model maker for BBC Television, Arthur’s friend, and BIS member, who last saw Clarke in 1999, at the British Film Institute showing of Kubrick’s remastered 2001 film print.)
- Bert Lewis (Met Clarke when he was a young student at Taunton Grammar School. Many years later in 1955 he stayed with Bert and his wife when on a lecture tour. The couple were challenged to get him to the dinner table because Arthur was completely engrossed in Bert’s great science fiction collection)
- Kelvin F. Long (Met Clarke at the London Science Museum in 1999. A fellow was pointing up to an exhibit, Arthur C. Clarke invented the communications satellite, and the man turned out to be Arthur. Kelvin and friends talked briefly with Clarke, and this changed Kelvin’s his life, which is now devoted to “rejuvenating the study on interstellar flight”)
- Sir Patrick Moore (Met Arthur at BIS when he was 12 and Arthur was 17—in 1934. They were fellow enthusiasts and both became great men in the space and astronomy fields. They were friends for 74 years!)
- Ray Ward (One of the great fans of Arthur C. Clarke, who met Arthur for the first time in 1971, when Clarke was in London and delivered a lecture at the BIS headquarters.)
- David Baker (Fellow of the British Interplanetary Society and currently the editor of its magazine, Spaceflight. He recalls the fascinating details of Kubrick’s advance men mining NASA’s concept and project art to supply realism to the film. Dr. Baker worked in the US space program for more than 25 years, and spanned the early days of the Gemini program, through the years of Apollo mission planning and with the Space Shuttle program during the 1970s and 80s. He’s been a genuine space cadet throughout his full career.
Image: Brighton 1987. David Brin, Fred Clarke, Charles Sheffield and Robert Forward. Credit: BIS/Apogee Prime/Rocket Publishing.
Chapter VII – Treading the Sands of Mars: Arthur’s work in Retrospect (20 pp)
Eight book reviews, one review of current state of space exploration, written by 7 reviewers, with Adam Crowl and Mark Stewart writing two each. One novel, The Sands of Mars, is reviewed twice, and the review is of a limited edition which presents his teenage writings. The reviewers are, in order of appearance:
Kelvin F. Long – The City and the Stars
John Silvester – The Sands of Mars
Adam Crowl – The Sands of Mars
Gregory L. Matloff – Childhood’s End
Paul McAuley – Rendezvous with Rama
Adam Crowl – Earthlight
Mark Stewart – 2001: A Space Odyssey
Andy Sawyer – Childhood Ends (Not the famous 1953 novel, but ACC’s teenage writings)
Mark Stewart – “Arthur’s Guide to the Universe” (A review of the current state of the planet’s space-faring, as seen through the works of Clarke)
Chapter IX – Father to the Man – Stephen Baxter (8 pp.)
“We seem to be young, in a very old Galaxy. We’re like kids tiptoeing through a ruined mansion.” — Stephen Baxter, Ark
And Arthur Clarke was the first kid in line to open up the doors that still were on their hinges. This piece by well-known novelist Stephen Baxter is a wonderful tribute from a successful and grateful author who was brought up on Clarke’s novels, stories, and nonfiction science writings.
There are many insightful personal and professional expressions of his late-in life friendship with Arthur Clarke, and the concluding paragraph of his essay is one of the best.
“A writer’s early works, before experience and craft take over, can be a richer expression of his/her deepest influences and subconscious yearnings than later material. By returning in his and later life to visions from his boyhood, Clarke was revisiting the wellspring of his own creativity.”
Chapter XII -Later Days: 90th Birthday Reflections* (3pp.)
This three-page transcript is Arthur C. Clarke’s last media appearance that was uploaded to YouTube one week before his 90th birthday — on December 9, 2007. His assistant, Nalaka Gunawardene, made this significant event happen — once he approached Arthur and got a high-sign go ahead. Its first appearance, recalls Nalaka, “made some international news and soon became a hit on You Tube.” My bet is that all Clarke fans alive today have seen this broadcast at least once, and millions of other viewers around planet Earth also saw Arthur Clarke and heard his final goodbye to the world.
*Readers who wish to know more about the “back story” of this final media appearance should refer to Neil McAleer’s definitive biography, Visionary: The Odyssey of Sir Arthur C. Clarke, chapter 44, “Two Media One Last Time.” (The eBook edition of this biography, published by RosettaBooks, is retitled as Sir Arthur C. Clarke: Odyssey of a Visionary, which has a new preface.
The Reviewer now humbly titles the review, The Good Starship Arthur C. Clarke, with the four authors on its bridge, taking the helm in turn. And there are 30 other crew members, all important to the mission of the good starship Arthur C. Clarke.
Beautiful night last night. Southern Cross
(a very feeble constellation) just above the
front gate, with Alpha Centauri beside it.
It always gives me an odd feeling to look
at Alpha and to realize that’s the next stop.
–Letter to Val Cleaver, 1955
——-
Arthur C. Clarke: A Life Remembered
$22.95 plus shipping. ISBN 978-1926837-26-0
Available from Apogee Prime Books through the links below.
http://www.apogeeprime.com/prime/bookpages/9781926837260.html
http://www.bis-space.com/2013/06/25/11092/out-now-arthur-c-clarke-a-life-remembered
This last link is the original announcement from Apogee Books
http://www.cgpublishing.com/9781926837260.html
by Paul Gilster | Oct 11, 2013 | Culture and Society |
A graduate of Cambridge University, Rachel Armstrong completed her clinical training at the John Radcliffe Medical School at the University of Oxford in 1991 and in 2009 embarked on a PhD in chemistry and architecture at University College London. She now serves as co-director of AVATAR (Advanced Virtual and Technological Architectural Research) at the University of Greenwich, London, and as Visiting Research Assistant at the Center for Fundamental Living Technology, Department of Physics and Chemistry, University of Southern Denmark. In this essay, based on a late September presentation at FutureFest in London, Dr. Armstrong recalls the English soothsayer known as ‘Mother Shipton’ and the petrifying well in Yorkshire that has long been associated with her name. The ensuing thoughts on black sky thinking take us into the realm of ‘living architecture’ and her engagement with the worldship ambitions of Icarus Interstellar.
by Rachel Armstrong
“To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.” Henri Bergson
They said she was a born a crone. An abomination, forged from leftovers that Nature would not claim – spat out as a bastard child in a damp cave by the River Nidd, as the very moon shunned her.
They said her stench was so rotten that she walked on a cloud of flies.
They said she turned water into stone.
They said these things and much more. And yet they went in droves, down to the Petrifying Well to see ugly Old Mother Shipton.
They all came, hoping to influence their fates, since the woman who defied the very laws of Nature could also see what the future had to hold – and so, enable them to take corrective, or aversive measures. Yet the powers of this sorceress were incompletely revealed for she was also the guardian to a technology that could match the potency of Nature.
Yet, not all the things they said about Mother Shipton were untrue. Today her miraculous technology lies unclaimed, lurking in full view, as a tourist attraction.
While the Enlightenment gave us a new set of tools that replaced our oracles and used the powers of science to enable different kinds of predictions, even these approaches had their limits, being less reliable as time passed, or as events became increasingly complex. Indeed, even in our highly technologized era our ancient anxieties are stirred when our current toolsets cannot clearly see the future.
We have recently come to regard these limits as singularities, which are technologically mediated events that introduce time and complexity into our reality so rapidly that they render our predictive methods ineffective. Indeed, it is said they threaten to “rupture the fabric of human history”. They include a range of anticipated incidents such as, the AI singularity (where machine intelligence exceeds that of humans), the Transhuman singularity (where our bodies are no longer naturally made), the Virtual singularity (where we upload our identities) and even the Escape Velocity singularity (where human lifespans increase so dramatically they disrupt our current notions of humanity).
But although these singularities may seem diverse, they stem from a particular kind of thinking, which originates from an Enlightenment worldview. This is set to ‘hard’ control the future that involves accurately forecasting events, so that we can better deal with, design, or prevent them from happening.
Yet, the inability to know exactly what happens next, does not imply Faustian bargains to evade grey goo scenarios as Bill Joy may claim, but anticipates disruption in our experience of reality. Through GPS, scientific instruments and the data processing powers of modern computing, a model of the world has emerged that has increased our awareness of new existential risks to our human culture. They indicate we face an era of great changes that are posed by Nature herself. Over the course of this century we are likely to witness flooding, dramatic weather patterns and resource shortages, which will reach tipping points where systems behave unpredictably and which we are currently powerless to predict or prevent.
Nature does not obey the linear laws of machines but operates in complex, contextualised and irreversible ways, which exist beyond the singularity in places that we cannot see clearly. We may think of these conceptual opacities as the Black Sky, for which, we need a different toolset – this is Black Sky Thinking.
Black Sky Thinking is tactical, propositional and iterative. It draws existing threads of experience together and weaves a loose reality fabric from them. It then repeats the process until we can start to see the world around us again clearly and bump confidently up against its warp and weft, under new blue skies.
I’d like to talk about a particular singularity to offer an example of Black Sky Thinking – the Interstellar singularity, which occurs when humans leave the solar system. Our journey to the stars may be happening sooner than you think! Right now, Icarus Interstellar are catalysing the construction of a worldship in earth’s orbit within a hundred years.
I am project leader for Persephone, which is one of the projects of Icarus Interstellar, and responsible for the living interior to this worldship. This may be thought of a unique kind of Nature that supports its space faring inhabitants. But since this project will be realised in more than one lifetime, and also exists within an age of exponential technological change, it is difficult – if not impossible – to see how can we even begin to imagine how we might deploy the necessary technologies to construct the living fabric for a worldship that does not already exist.
Persephone indeed inhabits Black Sky territory.
My work addresses the unknown challenges of building a living environment for the worldship by harnessing the computational properties of matter that is powered by sub atomic networks, chemical relationships and flows of energy. These take place in parallel and operate in real time, so we can think of the natural world as a kind of technology and harness its potential using the techniques of Natural Computing. This term was inspired by Alan Turing’s interest in the computational powers of nature and provides us with an alternative technological platform to machines, which helps us map and shape continually unfolding solution spaces.
The outputs of this approach propose a new kind of Nature with its own unique laws based in the physics and chemistry of the systems that underpin the worldship. So rather than extrapolating the consequences of conceptual models – Black Sky Thinking literally feels its way around the possibilities, by mapping and working with the nature of reality, without having to know the future. Persephone will shape her world from the bottom up through her soils, which may be considered as being a highly complex, self-producing Natural Computer.
I have already conducted Natural Computing experiments using chemistries that are lively, and resist the decay towards equilibrium to grow structures like chemical worms and banded soil-like substrates.
Indeed, nature’s technologies are unlike those of machines. They are not made from a world of geometrically bound objects but are born from a dynamic field of possibility that is based on networks, relationships and flows. Such technologies are already so familiar to us that we take them for granted, as they exist beneath our feet. Indeed, our soils are the foundation of all civilizations. They occur spontaneously, acting as chemical transformers and give rise to fields of material probability, whose effects can be expressed in terms of land fertility. Soil technology may help us feel our way around a new kind of reality – not by consuming resources – but by endlessly transforming matter in complex entanglements of flow and metabolism that result in fundamentally life promoting events – ones that we can shape.
The story of Mother Shipton directly speaks to my work, but not because of her conceptually forged, bold prophesies that spoke of times when ‘men would walk and communicate underwater’ or women would wear ‘trousers’ to straddle transport as if astride a broomstick.
Nor am I drawn to the legend of a woman who embodies a complete deconstruction of our aestheticized views of Nature, which Timothy and Morton and Slavoj Žižek declare get in the way of dealing with the materiality of the actual world through our preconceptions.
I am drawn to Mother Shipton’s legend because of the very place she lived – as it harboured a natural computer. In Mother Shipton’s petrifying well, soft objects are turned to stone.
This has nothing to do with the anti-natural tendencies of a profane woman but may be attributed to the synthetic properties of elemental infrastructures. Nor are the features of the well simply a ‘natural’ phenomenon untouched by humans. They are carefully orchestrated by the drivers of our material reality, based in physics and chemistry, operating in conjunction with people who come to ritualistically place soft objects in the mineral-rich waters. Here the transformation begins. The soft object becomes saturated with water, which flows through the porous matrixes by capillary action and as the water evaporates from these permeable bodies, it leaves limestone-like deposits behind, like kettle scale.
The mouth of the well drips stone objects from its damp matrix, which are hung by threads that suspend the soft bodies between the ground and the air, where they await to be transformed into something more lasting -that enfolds sacrificial objects such as, teddy bears, lobsters, brushes and even John Wayne’s hat – into the fabric of the rocks.
These processes, as magical and unconventional as they may seem, exist today and embody a rudimentary framework for a natural computer. In its current form, the stone spinning web can be considered as a primordial prototype to harness, what David Glissen calls, ‘pre-natural’ forces and offers a glimpse of what this emerging technological field may hold. Such technologies may not only be developed through our increasing knowledge of chemistry, physics and biology and but may also be evolved into more sophisticated, computational matrices that function as artificial soils and may eventually bring worldships to life – or help us invent new forms of construction, repair and recycling for our increasingly resource constrained cities.
So, these unnatural life forms – hag and worldship – share something in common with all living things in that they defy the very odds of their existence. Yet they do not survive by submitting to the random lottery of evolution but are post natural hybrids that manipulate the fabric of reality by drawing its material threads together and shaping it through their own force and will as incessant acts of survival and growth. Using the technology of natural computing these post natural bodies spin firm fabrics out of elemental cycles and grow new worlds from the very guts of Nature and make claim to an existence that they do not assume as a given.
In full view, the drip, drip, dripping of the Mother Shipton stone web permeates and transforms the soft bodies carefully placed in its immortal well. Sometimes it spins this way – and at other times it twists that way. From time to time, strange and unexpected nodules bulge expectantly and in those prodigious moments that precede a decision, it seems that life itself may split the sac, and all is possible.
“The idea of the future, pregnant with an infinity of possibilities, is thus more fruitful than the future itself, and this is why we find more charm in hope than in possession, in dreams than in reality.” Henri Bergson, Time And Free Will
