#interstellar exploration

'Oumuamua is such an odd object and behaved so oddly that serious scientists, such as Avi Loeb, think it might possibly be artificial, built by an alien civilisation.

If so, it looks as if we are on the right lines with solar sails, but need to improve communication technology.

There’s been some attention lately to a contest on designing an interstellar generation ship, a large scale ship that humans live in for generations while it crosses interstellar space to another solar system. As Paul Gilster at Centauri Dreams notes, generation ships are a long time staple in science fiction, albeit with the common trope of the crew forgetting that they’re on a ship, or other…

I’ve discussedthe difficulties of interstellar exploration before.  To get a spacecraft to another star within a human lifetime requires accelerating it to an appreciable percentage of c (the speed of light), say 10-20%.  In general that requires titanic amounts of energy.  (Forget about the common sci-fi scenarios of going into warp drive or jumping through or into hyperspace.  Those are fantasy…

First, in case you haven’t heard: 70,000 Years Ago, Another Star Flew by the Edge of the Solar System | RealClearScience.

According to an international team of astronomers, about 70,000 years ago a red dwarf star — nicknamed “Scholz’s star” for the astronomer who discovered it — passed by our solar system just 0.8 light years distant. In fact, 98% of the 10,000 simulations the team ran projected…

If human civilization is to extend itself beyond our planet, it will need to take with it the plants, animals and microorganisms that can sustain a living ecosystem. Nick Nielsen argues in this compelling essay that preserving our own species [&]

Here is a link to my most recent contribution to Centauri Dreams. I hope to say more about the biology of extraterrestrial expansion, since many thinkers on the future tend to be highly anthropocentric in their formulations, and I think that this tendency needs a corrective.