Imagining and Planning Interstellar Exploration
We ve yet to find any evidence of intelligent life beyond Earth, a puzzling failure given the widespread belief that where habitable planets exist, life will somehow emerge. If we do receive a signal, though, would we be able to understand it? We ve made some progress in piecing together animal communications here on Earth, but figuring [ ]
Thinking about a great filter through which a civilization must pass before its survival is assured usually leads to catastrophic scenarios, such as planetary suicide by nuclear war, or climate holocaust (assuming the filter lies ahead of us and not behind). But filters may be more subtle and tied in with epistemology. How does intelligence [ ]
If we couldn’t figure out what to call CD-35 2722B b, which I assume is the correct way to refer to the planet-sized object in this red dwarf / brown dwarf/ gas giant system, another planet has a bit of a definitional problem as well. LHS 1140 b is an interesting super-Earth orbiting a red [ ]
Problems of definition will long be with us as we take ever closer looks at exoplanets. But they’re suddenly on everyone’s mind because of the detection of what some are calling an ‘exomoon’ in the system CD-35 2722, found in the constellation Columba. The primary in this system is an M-dwarf thought to be 50–200 [ ]
Building the infrastructure we will need for interstellar exploration requires an imaginative look at today’s technologies as applied to distant targets. Indeed, we can leverage the scientific interest in, say, an orbit around each of the ice giants to explore launch capabilities through beamed energy, but we will also need to consider how we can [ ]
Self-replicating probes continue to be a controversial subject, just as they were when Frank Tipler up the ante on Michael Hart by invoking them as a way of further tightening the tension of the Fermi Paradox. After all, Tipler had discovered an economic edge. Any civilization that wants to colonize the galaxy is going to [ ]
Frank Tipler jolted the astrophysics community in 1980 when he introduced self-replicating interstellar probes into discussion of the Fermi Paradox. The mathematical model of self-replication came from John von Neumann, and was codified in 1966 (after von Neumann s death) by Arthur Burks in Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata (1966). SF fans will also know of Fred [ ]
Mission planning for any future star probe will adjust not only for conditions in the interstellar medium but also the Solar System’s outer reaches. Let’s confine ourselves for now to conditions in the outer heliosphere. Currently we have precisely one spacecraft operating here. New Horizons has only reached 65 AU from the Sun, while Voyager [ ]
The headwaters of the Fermi Paradox channel directly through Michael Hart and Frank Tipler, and it’s a testament to the power of their arguments that this remains true today. It was Hart who in An Explanation for the Absence of Extraterrestrials on Earth (published in the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1975) [ ]
With well over 6,000 exoplanets now confirmed and a continuing flow of data containing new detections, it has been clear for some time that our own Solar System’s model is hardly a template. I enjoy dipping into the bewildering variety of new systems and pondering the contingencies that have led to their architecture. Science fiction [ ]