‘Space’ Archives
Upcoming Interstellar Sessions
It’s shaping up to be an interesting week. I want to get to the recent Kepler data release, and also to the antimatter news from CERN, and I also want to talk about everything from decelerating an interstellar craft to models of expansion into the galaxy a la Frank Tipler. . For today, though, let’s look at two upcoming conferences, especially [...]
Science Fiction and the Probe
Physicist Al Jackson, who is the world’s greatest dinner companion, holds that title because amongst his scientific accomplishments, he is also a fountainhead of information about science fiction. No matter which writer you bring up, he knows something you never heard of that illuminates that writer’s work. So it was no surprise that when the [...]
Intelligent Probes: The Spread-Spectrum Challenge
Let’s imagine for a moment that John Mathews (Pennsylvania State University) is right in theorizing that space-faring civilizations will use self-reproducing probes to expand into the galaxy. We’ve been kicking the issues around most of this week, but the SETI question continues to hang in the background. For if there really are [...]
SETI and Self-Reproducing Probes
It was back in the 1980s when Robert Freitas came up with a self-reproducing probe concept based on the British Interplanetary Society’s Project Daedalus, but extending it in completely new directions. Like Daedalus, Freitas’ REPRO probe would be fusion-based and would mine the atmosphere of Jupiter to acquire the necessary helium-3. Unlike [...]
Oxygen Detected at Saturn’s Moon Dione
We recently looked at biosignatures as part of a discussion about using polarized light to examine exoplanet atmospheres. As if on cue, we now get a reminder of how carefully the biosignature hunt must proceed. It’s not enough, for example, to find one or two interesting gases in a distant atmosphere, for natural processes can account for [...]
Robotic Networks Among the Stars
Imagine a future in which we manage to reach average speeds in the area of one percent of the speed of light. That would make for a 437-year one-way trip to the Alpha Centauri system, too long for anything manned other than generation ships or missions with crews in some kind of suspended animation. Although 0.01c is well beyond our current [...]
A New Take on Planet Formation
Figuring out how planets form is an old occupation, with the basic ideas of planetary accretion going back several centuries, though tuned up, to be sure, in the 1970s and tweaked ever since. In a disk of gas and dust orbiting a young central star, dust grains begin to clump together, eventually forming planetesimals. Accretion models assume that [...]
Finding Life Through Polarized Light
One of these days we’re going to have a new generation of telescopes, some in space and some on the Earth, that can analyze the atmosphere of a terrestrial world around another star. It’s not enough to find individual gases like oxygen and ozone, carbon dioxide or methane. Any of these can occur naturally without ramifications for life. But [...]
Remembering an Astronautical Pioneer
by Claudio Maccone Physicist Les Shepherd, whose funeral is today, left friends throughout the astronautical community. Claudio Maccone, who worked with Shepherd on many occasions, was quick to offer his recollections of this remarkable man whose standards of excellence and unflagging support helped many young scientists as they embarked on [...]
Les Shepherd, RIP
There are so many things to say about Les Shepherd, who died on Saturday, February 18, that I scarcely know where to begin. Born in 1918, Leslie Robert Shepherd was a key player in the creation of the International Astronautical Federation (IAF), becoming its third president in 1957 — this was at the 8th Congress in Barcelona just a week [...]
