This is as strange a maze as e'er men trod, And there is in this business more than nature Was ever conduct of. That's Alonso in Shakespeare's late masterpiece The Tempest, a king of Naples who finds himself on a remote island where Prospero weaves his magical powers. It's an apt passage for Timothy Ferris to quote in his chapter "The Central Nervous System of the Milky Way," a part of the 1992 collection The Mind's Sky that was the basis of yesterday's post. For in an unusual conclusion to the essay, Ferris wonders whether the real purpose of a galactic network (and hence an ultimate goal of SETI) isn't passing along not only our science but our broader culture to other civilizations. "Who knows what importance our existence, or some shard of our thought, might have to a scholar or artist --- whether biological or artificial in origin -- in a remote galaxy in some far-future time?" It's a pleasing thought for a species used to feeling dwarfed by the universe, and it would apply to...

Although I'm taking a break from posting, a recent note from Marc Millis suggests something productive that can happen while I'm gone. The founding architect of the Tau Zero Foundation and former head of NASA's Breakthrough Propulsion Physics project, Marc deals with the issues he asks about below on a daily basis, and so do I. But compiling accurate, non-conflicting information about them can be tricky, which is why we could use your help. Read on. by Marc Millis While Paul is away, I have a request for you. We have a number of questions for which we need some help to find reliable answers. For all of you who have been wanting to help, here now is a chance. When answering these questions, we need to know where you got the information. Please cite the document where you found the information. We are looking for reliable information, so avoid articles that cite values to advocate a particular solution. We have found that some papers skew estimates for such things so that it will...

The charged air of mid-July in the northern hemisphere creates states of mind that can be both nostalgic and surreal. Ray Bradbury always knew how to catch these. Listen: Somewhere, a book said once, all the talk ever talked, all the songs ever sung, still lived, had vibrated way out in space and if you could travel to Far Centauri you could hear George Washington talking in his sleep or Caesar surprised at the knife in his back. So much for sounds. What about light then? All things, once seen, they didn't just die, that couldn't be. It must be then that somewhere, searching the world, perhaps in the dripping multiboxed honeycombs where light was an amber sap stored by pollen-fired bees, or in the thirty thousand lenses of the noon dragonfly's gemmed skull you might find all the colors and sights of the world in any one year. Or pour one single drop of this dandelion wine beneath a microscope and perhaps the entire world of July Fourth would firework out in Vesuvius showers... I love...

I'm looking forward to the upcoming Starship Congress hosted by Icarus Interstellar, which will take place in Dallas from August 15th to the 18th at the Hilton Anatole. With an audience of physicists, engineers and researchers of all kinds, this is a chance to catch up with old friends and firm up relationships that have in some cases been pursued solely through email. 2013 may be remembered as the year of the conference in interstellar terms, since we had the Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop in February, Starship Century in May, Starship Congress coming up in August, then the 100 Year Starship Symposium in Houston from September 19th to the 22nd. This doesn't include smaller events like the British Interplanetary Society's excellent Philosophy of the Starship gathering in late May, and if you're in range of BIS headquarters in London, it's worth checking out what's coming up on their always active schedule. But thoughts of indefatigable activity on the interstellar front...

Martin Rees' ideas on how humans will adapt to starflight, discussed here yesterday, offer plenty of ground for speculation and good science fiction. After all, the path ahead forks in many directions, one of them being the continuing development of artificial intelligence to the point where 'artilects' rather than humans become the logical crew for star missions. If decades or even centuries are needed to cross to another system, then this gets around the problem of keeping people sane and cooperating across what might be generations of voyaging. Another fork is biological, with humans being gradually engineered to make them more adaptable to environments they'll find at their destination. Here we can imagine crews sent out in some kind of deep hibernation, their biology tweaked to allow a ready transition to the new planet. Or perhaps cyborg solutions suggest themselves, with humans augmented by digital technologies to deal with problems and interface directly with critical...

How we'll go to the stars is often a question we answer with propulsion options. But of course the issue is larger than that. Will we, for example, go as biological beings or in the form of artificial intelligence? For that matter, if we start thinking about post-human intelligence, as Martin Rees does in the recently published Starship Century, are we talking about reality or a simulation? As the Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom has speculated, a supremely advanced culture could create computer simulations capable of modeling the entire universe. Rees recapitulates the argument in his essay "To the Ends of the Universe": A culture that could create simulations as complex as the universe we live in might create virtual universes in the billions as a ripe domain for study or pure entertainment, allowing a kind of 'time travel' in which the past is reconstructed and the simulation masters can explore their history. So there we have a play on the nature of reality itself and the notion...

Tracking down starflight in literature is an absorbing pastime. When I was writing my Centauri Dreams book, I found that I was vaguely familiar with many of the antecedents of today's science fictional journeys, but a book called Wunderwelten, by Friedrich Wilhelm Mader, took me by surprise. A 1911 adventure novel for young readers, Wunderwelten imagines a sphere that, in the fashion of the time's space fiction, was moved by antigravity in a multi-year journey to Alpha Centauri. Mader's ship, called 'Sannah,' was a precursor to all the Centauri-bound starships to come. What a delight to find Sannah emerge in the form of Sannah III in Stephen Baxter's story "Star Call," which appears in the recently published Starship Century. But Baxter's updated ship is a far cry from the 50-meter antigravity vessel imagined by Mader. For one thing, it's gifted with artificial intelligence: I am called Sannah III because I am the third of four copies who were created in the NuMind Laboratory at the...

Could there be a more time-worn trope in science fiction than the arrival of colonists or explorers on a new world? The stage is set for adventure and the unwinding of whatever plot theme the author has in mind, but if the planet is Earth-like, we see the colonists quickly settling in, adapting to local conditions and, in relatively short order, creating a new society. Back in the 1950s the film When Worlds Collide showed the arrival of desperate survivors of a doomed Earth on a planet that would be their refuge, the assumption being that from this point on, everything would be no more difficult than setting up a camp on some new continent. Would it be so? For that matter, would our human crew be able to survive the journey? Paul Davies has his doubts, and he expressed them forcefully at the recent Starship Century event in San Diego. While we tend to concentrate on time and distance problems -- how do you get something moving fast enough to get your crew to another star within a...

NASA has released an Asteroid Initiative Request for Information on the issue of asteroid retrieval. It's an interesting document both in its audience -- the agency is making a point about soliciting comments not only from academics, scientists and engineers but the general public -- but also because of the issues it explores. Being sought are ideas on how best to capture an asteroid, land an astronaut on one, and change its orbit, not necessarily in that order. The Los Angeles Times quotes NASA associate director Robert Lightfoot on the public component of NASA's initiative: "Too often, by the time we present a mission to the public, it has already been baked, and there's not much we can change. This is your chance to present your ideas to us before the mission is baked." If you're interested in contributing, move quickly, for the deadline for responses is July 18, with a workshop to follow in September. The creation of a Solar System-wide infrastructure will necessarily precede any...

The star Gliese 667C is as intriguing as it is because it underlines in triplicate the 'habitability' question, which surfaces every time a planet is discovered in a zone around its star where liquid water could exist on the surface. This is the classic definition of 'habitable zone,' meaning not so much a place where humans could live -- we have no knowledge of other conditions on these worlds, knowing little more than their minimum mass -- but a place where a basic condition for life as we know it is possible. I'm much in favor of considering exotic environments for life, and these would include venues ranging from the upper clouds of Venus to the depths of the icy gas giant satellites in our own system. But when we read about 'habitable zones' in most scientific papers, we're usually falling back on the liquid water criterion because it's hard enough to search for any kind of life on a distant world, much less a kind that we don't even know exists. Liquid water is a starting...

What does it take to conceive a new vision of the future and drive the idea forward? Keith Cooper, editor of Astronomy Now as well as Principium, the journal of the Institute for Interstellar Studies, examines the question in the context of a new book. Grand ideas aren't enough, for the commitment to build community and expand the audience for a breakthrough are the necessary foundation. What Gerard O'Neill and Eric Drexler can teach us about this and how their example may inform the future choices of the interstellar movement are at the heart of Keith's review. Along the way come many questions, especially this: Is a 'failure of nerve to play the long game' what is holding us back as we contemplate a future among the stars? by Keith Cooper In 1972, a think-tank of businessmen, politicians, economists, scientists and bureaucrats going by the name 'The Club of Rome' (they held their first meeting in the Italian capital in 1968) painted a picture of a dystopian future where by the year...

There was a time when people collected old photographs in drawers and photo albums, a time before the digital age when you wasted three or four shots getting just the one you wanted, and the perishability of film was born home every time you saw colors fading on an old image. Yesterday I browsed through black and white snapshots of family members long gone, pictures taken in the 1920s and 1930s, and thought about how we try to preserve memory by framing a moment. Then I thought about how July 19, 2013 was itself going to be preserved, a celestial alignment snatched from time as seen from deep in the Solar System. Carolyn Porco, who serves as imaging team leader for the Cassini Saturn orbiter, calls July 19 'a day for all the world to celebrate.' Cassini will look back at our planet and snap our picture in natural color next to the fabulous system of rings and moons it's been showing us all along. Thus a pixel from Cassini's 1.44 billion kilometers will become an opportunity for...