A friend and I were sitting in a diner some time back talking mostly about old movies (my passion is for black-and-white films from 1927 to the death of Bogart in 1957). Somehow the topic of gravity came up, I suspect because we had homed in on early 50’s science...
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Self-Assembly: Reshaping Mission Design
It’s interesting to contemplate the kind of missions we could fly if we develop lightweight smallsats coupled with solar sails, deploying them in Sundiver maneuvers to boost their acceleration. Getting past Voyager 1’s 17.1 kilometers per second would itself be a...
Stapledon’s Hawk
Walking along dark streets this morning, as autumn leaves gusted past under a deepening lunar eclipse, I realized that there was a reason for my recent foray into what I called ‘Stapledon thinking.’ The reason: Landscape by moonlight. What these early walks remind me...
SETI as a Central Project: An Addendum to Space Development Futures
How does SETI fit into the long-term objectives of a civilization? To a society whose central project is communication, the 'success' of the project in detecting intelligence around another star is obviously not assured, but if it does find a signal, would it...
How Far Can Civilization Go?
Robert H. Gray, author of The Elusive Wow: Searching for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, has searched for radio signals from other worlds using the Very Large Array and other radio telescopes. You'll find numerous links to his work in the archives here. In today's...
A Drake Equation for Alien Artifacts
Jim Benford's study of 'lurkers' -- possibly ancient probes that may have been placed here by extraterrestrial civilizations to monitor our planet's development -- breaks into two parts. The first, published Friday, considered stars passing near our Sun in the...
Space Development Futures: Spacefaring Infrastructures of Indifferently Spacefaring Civilizations
How do we go about crafting a spacefaring civilization? Nick Nielsen has been exploring the issues involved in terms of the choices cultures make and their conception of their future. Change the society and you change the outcome, with huge ramifications for our...
Extraterrestrial: On ‘Oumuamua as Artifact
The reaction to Avi Loeb's new book Extraterrestrial (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2021) has been quick in coming and dual in nature. I'm seeing a certain animus being directed at the author in social media venues frequented by scientists, not so much for suggesting the...
A Black Cloud of Computation
Moore’s Law, first stated all the way back in 1965, came out of Gordon Moore’s observation that the number of transistors per silicon chip was doubling every year (it would later be revised to doubling every 18-24 months). While it’s been cited countless times to...
Cloud Computing at Astronomical Scales
Interesting things happen to stars after they've left the main sequence. So-called Asymptotic Giant Branch (AGB) stars are those less than nine times the mass of the Sun that have already moved through their red giant phase. They're burning an inner layer of helium...