Toward Kardashev Type I

by | Apr 29, 2022 | | 83 Comments

It seems a good time to re-examine the venerable Kardashev scale marking how technological civilizations develop. After all, I drop Nikolai Kardashev's name into articles on a regular basis, and we routinely discuss whether a SETI detection might be of a particular Kardashev type. The Russian astronomer first proposed the scale in 1964 at the storied Byurakan conference on radio astronomy, and it has been discussed and extended as a way of gauging the energy use of technological cultures ever since. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Jonathan Jiang, working with an international team of collaborators, spurs this article through a new paper that analyzes when our culture could reach Kardashev Type I, so let's remind ourselves of just what Type I means. Kardashev wanted to consider how a civilization consumes energy, and defined Type I as being at the planetary level, with a power consumption of 1016 watts. This approximates a civilization using all the energy available from its home...

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Interstellar Implications of the Electric Sail

by | Apr 26, 2022 | | 47 Comments

Not long ago we looked at Greg Matloff’s paper on von Neumann probes, which made the case that even if self-reproducing probes were sent out only once every half million years (when a close stellar encounter occurs), there would be close to 70 billion systems occupied by such probes within a scant 18 million years. Matloff now considers interstellar migration in a different direction in a new paper addressing how M-dwarf civilizations might expand, and why electric sails could be their method. It’s an intriguing notion because M-dwarfs are by far the most numerous stars in the galaxy, and if we learn that they can support life, they might house vast numbers of civilizations with the capability of sending out interstellar craft. They’re also crippled in terms of electromagnetic flux when it comes to conventional solar sails, which is why the electric sail comes into play as a possible alternative, here analyzed in terms of feasibility and performance and its prospects for enabling...

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Europa’s Double Ridges: Implications for a Habitable Ocean

by | Apr 22, 2022 | | 31 Comments

I’m always interested in studies that cut across conventional boundaries, capturing new insights by applying data from what had appeared, at first glance, to be unrelated disciplines. Thus the news that the ice shell of Europa may turn out to be far more dynamic than we have previously considered is interesting in itself, given the implications for life in the Jovian moon’s ocean, but also compelling because it draws on a study that focused on Greenland and originally sought to measure climate change. The background here is that the Galileo mission that gave us our best views of Europa’s surface so far showed us that there are ‘double ridges’ on the moon. In fact, these ridge pairs flanked by a trough running between them are among the most common landforms on a surface packed with troughs, bands and chaos terrain. The researchers, led by Stanford PhD student Riley Culberg, found them oddly familiar. Culberg, whose field is electrical engineering (that multidisciplinary effect again)...

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Good News for a Gravitational Focus Mission

by | Apr 19, 2022 | | 45 Comments

We’ve talked about the ongoing work at the Jet Propulsion Society on the Sun’s gravitational focus at some length, most recently in JPL Work on a Gravitational Lensing Mission, where I looked at Slava Turyshev and team’s Phase II report to the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts office. The team is now deep into the work on their Phase III NIAC study, with a new paper available in preprint form. Dr. Turyshev tells me it can be considered a summary as well as an extension of previous results, and today I want to look at the significance of one aspect of this extension. There are numerous reasons for getting a spacecraft to the distance needed to exploit the Sun’s gravitational lens – where the mass of our star bends the light of objects behind it to produce a lens with extraordinary properties. The paper, titled “Resolved Imaging of Exoplanets with the Solar Gravitational Lens,” notes that at optical or near-optical wavelengths, the amplification of light is on the order of ~ 2 X 1011,...

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NASA Interstellar Probe: Overview and Prospects

by | Apr 15, 2022 | | 51 Comments

A recent paper in Acta Astronautica reminds me that the Mission Concept Report on the Interstellar Probe mission has been available on the team's website since December. Titled Interstellar Probe: Humanity's Journey to Interstellar Space, this is the result of lengthy research out of Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory under the aegis of Ralph McNutt, who has served as principal investigator. I bring the mission concept up now because the new paper draws directly on the report and is essentially an overview to the community about the findings of this team. We've looked extensively at Interstellar Probe in these pages (see, for example, Interstellar Probe: Pushing Beyond Voyager and Assessing the Oberth Maneuver for Interstellar Probe, both from 2021). The work on this mission anticipates the Solar and Space Physics 2023-2032 Decadal Survey, and presents an analysis of what would be the first mission designed from the top down as an interstellar craft. In that sense, it could be...

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Toward a Multilayer Interstellar Sail

by | Apr 12, 2022 | | 35 Comments

Centauri Dreams tracks ongoing work on beamed sails out of the conviction that sail designs offer us the best hope of reaching another star system within this century, or at least, the next. No one knows how this will play out, of course, and a fusion breakthrough of spectacular nature could shift our thinking entirely – so, too, could advances in antimatter production, as Gerald Jackson’s work reminds us. But while we continue the effort on all alternative fronts, beamed sails currently have the edge. On that score, take note of a soon to be available two-volume set from Philip Lubin (UC-Santa Barbara), which covers the work he and his team have been doing under the name Project Starlight and DEEP-IN for some years now. This is laser-beamed propulsion to a lightsail, an idea picked up by Breakthrough Starshot and central to its planning. The Path to Transformational Space Exploration pulls together Lubin and team’s work for NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts office, as well as work...

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AB Aurigae b: The Case for Disk Instability

by | Apr 8, 2022 | | 5 Comments

What to make of a Jupiter-class planet that orbits its host star at a distance of 13.8 billion kilometers? This is well over twice the distance of Pluto from the Sun, out past the boundaries of what in our system is known as the Kuiper Belt. Moreover, this is a young world still in the process of formation. At nine Jupiter masses, it's hard to explain through conventional modeling, which sees gas giants growing through core accretion, steadily adding mass through progressive accumulation of circumstellar materials. Core accretion makes sense and seems to explain typical planet formation, with the primordial cloud around an infant star dense in dust grains that can accumulate into larger and larger objects, eventually growing into planetesimals and emerging as worlds. But the new planet - AB Aurigae b - shouldn't be there if core accretion were the only way to produce a planet. At these distances from the star, core accretion would take far longer than the age of the system to produce...

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Ramping Up the Technosignature Search

by | Apr 6, 2022 | | 32 Comments

In the ever growing realm of acronyms, you can't do much better than COSMIC - the Commensal Open-Source Multimode Interferometer Cluster Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. This is a collaboration between the SETI Institute and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), which operates the Very Large Array in New Mexico. The news out of COSMIC could not be better for technosignature hunters: Fiber optic amplifiers and splitters are now installed at each of the 27 VLA antennas. What that means is that COSMIC will have access to the complete datastream from the entire VLA, in effect an independent copy of everything the VLA observes. Now able to acquire VLA data, the researchers are proceeding with the development of high-performance Graphical Processing Unit (GPU) code for data analysis. Thus the search for signs of technology among the stars gains momentum at the VLA. Image: SETI Institute post-doctoral researchers, Dr Savin Varghese and Dr Chenoa Tremblay, in front of one...

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Microlensing: K2’s Intriguing Find

by | Apr 5, 2022 | | 4 Comments

Exoplanet science can look forward to a rash of discoveries involving gravitational microlensing. Consider: In 2023, the European Space Agency will launch Euclid, which although not designed as an exoplanet mission per se, will carry a wide-field infrared array capable of high resolution. ESA is considering an exoplanet microlensing survey for Euclid, which will be able to study the galactic bulge for up to 30 days twice per year, perhaps timed for the end of the craft’s cosmology program. Look toward crowded galactic center long enough and you just may see a star in the galaxy's disk move in front of a background star located much further away in that dense bulge. The result: The lensing phenomenon predicted by Einstein, with the light of the background star magnified by the intervening star. If that star has a planet, it's one we can detect even if it's relatively small, and even if it's widely spaced from its star. For its part, NASA plans to launch the Roman space telescope by...

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Charter

In Centauri Dreams, Paul Gilster looks at peer-reviewed research on deep space exploration, with an eye toward interstellar possibilities. For many years this site coordinated its efforts with the Tau Zero Foundation. It now serves as an independent forum for deep space news and ideas. In the logo above, the leftmost star is Alpha Centauri, a triple system closer than any other star, and a primary target for early interstellar probes. To its right is Beta Centauri (not a part of the Alpha Centauri system), with Beta, Gamma, Delta and Epsilon Crucis, stars in the Southern Cross, visible at the far right (image courtesy of Marco Lorenzi).

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If you'd like to submit a comment for possible publication on Centauri Dreams, I will be glad to consider it. The primary criterion is that comments contribute meaningfully to the debate. Among other criteria for selection: Comments must be on topic, directly related to the post in question, must use appropriate language, and must not be abusive to others. Civility counts. In addition, a valid email address is required for a comment to be considered. Centauri Dreams is emphatically not a soapbox for political or religious views submitted by individuals or organizations. A long form of the policy can be viewed on the Administrative page. The short form is this: If your comment is not on topic and respectful to others, I'm probably not going to run it.

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