If the title of this piece conjures up exotic images, that's all to the good. In fact, I'm surprised that "Alpha Centauri Sunrise" hasn't been the title of a science fiction story somewhere along the line, but a quick check shows no such reference. Thus when Robert Kennedy (The Ultimax Group) created a drink called the Alpha Centauri Sunrise at our recent conclave in Huntsville, he was breaking new ground. And maybe images of a double sunrise also came to mind, the view from an as yet undiscovered world where Centauri A is a bright flare in the morning sky while a still closer Centauri B begins to nudge up over the hills, flooding the scene with orange light. And what happened to Proxima Centauri? It would not be a factor in a scene like that, its light so dim that it would not stand out from other stars in a completely dark sky. Only its proper motion would alert local astronomers to how close it was (roughly 15000 AU). But let's drink to Proxima anyway. I promised the recipe for...

One of the things I love about writing Centauri Dreams is that I learn something new every day. Often this comes from the research needed for individual stories, but just as often it comes from readers suggesting new directions or seeing nuances in an earlier story that I had missed. Yesterday's post on long-term thinking led to an exchange with Centauri Dreams regular NS, who questioned my ideas on longevity in the Middle Ages, and before long we were both digging up data to try to discover what the numbers really are. It's an ongoing process, and if you're interested in such arcana, you can follow it in yesterday's comments thread. If you're just joining us and wondering why we're discussing medieval longevity, it ties into what I was saying about long-haul construction projects like cathedrals, and the question of what a worker on one of these projects might have thought of his chances of seeing its completion. You can also chalk it up to a fascination with the Middle Ages that...

I conceived an early love for Tennyson, but it wasn't until a bit later in life that I ran into his "Locksley Hall," which contains lines many science fiction fans are familiar with: Many a night I saw the Pleiads, rising thro' the mellow shade, Glitter like a swarm of fire-flies tangled in a silver braid. Here about the beach I wander'd, nourishing a youth sublime With the fairy tales of science, and the long result of Time; When the centuries behind me like a fruitful land reposed; When I clung to all the present for the promise that it closed: When I dipt into the future far as human eye could see; Saw the Vision of the world and all the wonder that would be.— and so on. The poem is the lament of a soldier returning to the places of his boyhood and eventually turning his thoughts, and his resolve, on the future. When I read the line 'the long result of time,' I realized that it was here that I found resonance with the poet. The idea of a remote futurity and the need to build...

It's surprising but gratifying that we can now talk about the 'interstellar community.' Just a few years back, there were many scientists and engineers studying the problems of starflight in their spare time, but when they met, it was at conferences dedicated to other subjects. The fact that the momentum has begun to grow is made clear by the explicitly interstellar conferences of recent memory, from the two 100 Year Starship symposia to the second Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop. Icarus Interstellar is mounting a conference this August in Dallas, and the Institute for Interstellar Studies plans its own gathering this fall in London. Of course the Internet is a big part of the picture -- Bob Forward and his colleagues could use the telephone and the postal service to keep in touch, but the energizing power of instant document exchange and online discussion was in the future. All this was apparent in Huntsville for the Tennessee Valley event, from which I have just returned....

Air travel presents us with challenges we seldom anticipate. Flying into Charlotte on Sunday I had developed a ferocious headache. I was headed to the Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop in Huntsville and had a long enough layover in Charlotte to seek out a pain reliever with decongestant properties. The ridiculous thing was that I couldn't get the plastic mini-pack open. The little symbol showed me tearing off the corner of the packet, but it wouldn't tear for me, and it wouldn't tear for the guy who happened to be sitting next to me at the USAir gate. It became clear that I needed something sharp to get into this packet, but it was also clear that I was in an airport, the very definition of which these days is to prevent passengers from having anything sharp. I finally took the packet back to the kiosk I bought it from and demanded redress. The lady looked askance at me, looked at the packet, and opened it effortlessly. Further comment seems superfluous. By the time I got off...

These days we know that perhaps a million objects the size of the Tunguska impactor or larger are moving through nearby space, and talk of how to deflect asteroids has become routine. Given our increasing awareness of near-Earth objects, it wouldn't be a surprise to hear of a new Hollywood treatment involving an Earth-threatening asteroid. But I wouldn't have expected a science fiction series that ran from 1959 to 1960 would have depicted an asteroid mission and the dangers such objects represent. Nonetheless, I give you "Asteroid," from the show Men Into Space, with script by Ted Sherdeman. Viewers on November 25, 1959 saw the show's protagonist Col. Edward McCauley (William Lundigan) take a crew to 'Skyra,' a 3.5-kilometer long rock that scientists believed might hit the Earth. The crew assesses whether the asteroid is salvageable for use as a space station and decides there is no other choice but to destroy Skyra, which they do at the cost of considerable suspense as McCauley...

How fast we go affects how we perceive time. That lesson was implicit in the mathematics of Special Relativity, but at the speed most of us live our lives, easily describable in Newtonian terms, we could hardly recognize it. Get going at a substantial percentage of the speed of light, though, and everything changes. The occupants of a starship moving at close to 90 percent of the speed of light age at half the rate of their counterparts back on Earth. Push them up to 99.999 percent of c and 223 years go by on Earth for every year they experience. Thus the 'twin paradox,' where the starfaring member of the family returns considerably younger than the sibling left behind. Carl Sagan played around with the numbers in the 1960s to show that a spacecraft moving at an acceleration of one g would be able to reach the center of the galaxy in 21 years (ship-time), while tens of thousands of years passed on Earth. Indeed, keep the acceleration constant and our crew can reach the Andromeda...

Sending messages into the galaxy normally goes under the rubric of METI - Messaging to Extraterrestrial Intelligence. In its electromagnetic form, the sending of directed signals to nearby star systems, it has proven more than a little controversial, as the work of Alexander Zaitsev at Evpatoria attests. But sending a message into space in the form of an artifact like the 'Golden Record' on the Voyager probes is also a form of METI, and one that excites as much introspection as passion. Larry Klaes has been looking at Trevor Paglen's Pictures from Earth project, which sends images of our world not to the stars but into a stable orbit near our planet. Who will eventually find these images and what will they make of them? What should we be thinking about when we represent ourselves to the universe? By Larry Klaes In the history of humanity, there have been a select number of key events which define the moments when our species became truly intelligent in terms of a self-aware...