Whenever we're audacious enough to categorize far future civilizations, we turn to the work of Nikolai Kardashev. Nick Nielsen today looks at the well known Kardashev scale in the light of a curious fact: While many use Kardashev's rankings in their own speculations, few have gone back and dug into his original paper. In Kardashev's terms, our planet is close to attaining Type I status, which would surprise many commentators. And doesn't the ambiguity over what constitutes the energy of a star -- red dwarf? red giant? -- play havoc with cut and dried 'type' definitions? How subsequent writers have adapted and modified the Kardashev scale makes for a cautionary tale about mastering our sources before using them for further extrapolation. For that matter, are there better gauges of a civilization than its use of particular energy resources? Answering the question deepens the debate that Kardashev so fruitfully began. by J. N. Nielsen The name of Nikolai S. Kardashev is synonymous with...

Last week I looked at three figures who put solar sails on the map in the 1950s -- Carl Wiley, who wrote the concept up in Astounding, Ted Cotter, who analyzed it for colleagues at Los Alamos, and Richard Garwin, who brought solar sailing into the academic journals. It was not long after Garwin's work that science fiction pounced on solar sails through a cluster of memorable stories beginning with Cordwainer Smith (Paul Linebarger) and "The Lady Who Sailed the Soul." More about that story and its era soon, including work by Poul Anderson, Jack Vance, and perhaps the best known of all from that era, Arthur C. Clarke's "Sunjammer." But today let's go way back to what is I think the first story that ever dealt with raw light as a propulsive mechanism. Georges Le Faure and Henri de Graffigny published Aventures extraordinaires d'un savant russe (The Extraordinary Adventures of a Russian Scientist) in three volumes beginning in 1889, with a fourth volume coming out under the promising...

I discovered Karl Schroeder's work when I was researching brown dwarfs some years ago. Who knew that somebody was writing novels about civilizations around these dim objects? Permanence (Tor, 2003) was a real eye-opener, as were the deep-space cultures it described. Schroeder hooked me again with his latest book -- he's dealing with a preoccupation of mine, a human presence in the deep space regions between ourselves and the nearest stars, where resources are abundant and dark worlds move far from any sun. How to maintain such a society and allow it to grow into something like an empire? Karl explains the mechanism below. Science fiction fans, of which there are many on Centauri Dreams, will know Karl as the author of many other novels, including Ventus (2000), Lady of Mazes (2005) and Sun of Suns (2006). by Karl Schroeder My newest science fiction novel, Lockstep, has just finished its serialization in Analog magazine, and Tor Books will have it on the bookshelves March 24....

Heath Rezabek, an Austin, TX-based librarian, futurist and long-term thinker, continues the chronicle of his evolving work on the Vessel project and its ramifications. Developed as a strategy for preserving our cultural and biological heritage, Vessel is inevitably a way to re-examine ourselves in new and startling ways. Science fiction offers a supple way to visualize what generations in the near and far future may draw from such archives, leading perhaps to created intelligences that grow by sampling our imagery, our artifacts, our mythologies. In the passage that follows, we meet an SF writer named Thea Ramer, and learn more about Dr. Kaasura, whose early work with Vessel points to synthetic minds, re-woven patterns of quantum reality and the development of Saudade-class starships. But let Heath explain... by Heath Rezabek This is the third installment in a continuing series of speculative fiction here on Centauri Dreams. Feedback from prior installments helps shape the themes and...

Growing up in the Sputnik era, I followed the fortunes of space exploration with huge enthusiasm. In those days, the model was primarily planetary in nature, the progression from the Moon to the nearest planets and then beyond seemingly inevitable. At the same time, a second model was developing around the idea of space stations and self-contained worlds built by man, one that would reach high visibility in the works of Gerard O'Neill, but one that ultimately reached back as far as the 1920's (Oberth and Noordung) and further back to the science fiction of Jules Verne. In fact, E. E. Hale's "The Brick Moon" explored a space station as early as 1869. But even as our Mariners and Veneras explored other planets, an interstellar thread was also emerging. Robert Goddard wrote about interstellar journeys in 1918, science fiction was full of such travel as the field matured in the 1940s and '50s, and serious scientific study of interstellar flight became established by mid-century. Writing...

I've had pulsars on the mind the last couple of days after our discussion of PSR 1257+12 and its contribution to exoplanetology. A bit more about pulsars today and the way we look at extreme objects through science fiction. PSR 1257+12 was discovered in 1990 by Aleksander Wolszczan using data from the Arecibo dish, and it was in 1992 that Wolszczan and Dale Frail published a paper outlining their discovery of the first planets ever found outside our Solar System. The two planets were joined by a third in 1994, but evidence for a fourth was later shown to be mistaken. In any case, the three planets confounded many astronomers, who hardly expected the first extrasolar planets to be found orbiting a radiation-spewing neutron star. Centauri Dreams regular Al Jackson was co-author of a 1992 study of PSR1257+12 that examined orbital resonance in the planets around the pulsar. In a note last night, Al mused "Just think of a K2 civilization setting up a research station on one of those to...