principium - initiative for interstellar studies · 2019. 11. 30. · principium | issue 5 |...

PRINCIPIUM

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TI T

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F OR I N T E R

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S T U D I E S

The Newsletter of the Institute for Interstellar Studies™

Introduction by Keith Cooper

News from the Institute

Community

Advances

The Art of Music

Jon Lomberg’s Starship Adventures

Retrospective: SETI

www.I4IS.orgScientia ad sidera

Knowledge to the Stars

Principium | Issue 5 | June/July 2013

Before a single starship even blasts off foralpha Centauri, interstellar research hasalready excelled itself by building a community.

Communities are important. They helpcreate a sense of unity towards a commongoal, allow the proliferation of ideasbetween like-minds and provide credibilityto a field far beyond what a few scatteredfree-thinkers can do.

Networking and meet-ups are essentialparts of being in a community and boy,there’s been quite a few interstellar meetups recently, with more just around thecorner! It is these frequent symposia,conferences, workshops and informal pubmeetings that help keep the topic vibrantand relatable. It’s one thing to read a bookor magazine article about interstellarflight, it’s another thing entirely to attenda conference and sit across a table from awell-respected scientist whose research ishelping to provide the groundwork for thequest to develop interstellar flight.Talking to these scientists and engineers,the whole topic feels – ironically – a littlemore down to Earth when you realisethere are real human beings workingtowards our common goal.

We have already featured the first ofthis year’s interstellar meetings in issuefour, namely Les Johnson’s TennesseeValley Interstellar Workshop. This issuewe include a report from James Benfordon the successful Starship Centurysymposium that took place at the ArthurC Clarke Center for HumanImagination at the University ofCalifornia, San Diego (don’t forget topick up a copy of the accompanying booktoo – see Community News on page 5 formore!). May also featured I4IS’ first eversymposium, in association with theBritish Interplanetary Society, entitledThe Philosophy of the Starship. Look outfor a full report next issue.

Coming up in August is IcarusInterstellar’s Starship Congress, a four-day extravaganza in Texas that willinclude talks by many of the leading lightsof interstellar research. I4IS will bepresent in large numbers at the Congress,with an exhibition stand and providingseveral speakers, so if you are attendingthe event be sure to stop by and say helloto our team.

Following the Starship Congress, there is a 100 Year Starship event in Septemberbefore a possible sequel to the Benford’sStarship Century symposium in Octoberin association with the BritishInterplanetary Society in London.

With so much going on there are plentyof opportunities to become involved,particularly if you are able to travel, butwhat if you cannot attend any of theseevents? At I4IS we are keen to include asmany of our members in activities aspossible, including contributing toPrincipium. So far we have featuredintroductions from members of the Boardof Directors, or invited articles aboutaspects of interstellar research fromspecific people. Now it is time to openthings up. If you would like to write forPrincipium, write to me [email protected]. I’m particularlylooking for introductory letters, book orother media reviews, or news about whatresearch or work our members areconducting in the interstellar field and forI4IS. So, put your thinking caps on, placefinger to keyboard, and get writing!

Keith Cooper

June 2013

Introduction byKeith Cooper


News from the InstituteMann, Gregory Matloff, Mike McCulloch,Ken Roy, Divya Shankar, Alex Storer andGiovanni Vulpetti, discussing topics asdiverse as the philosophy of star-flight,technologies for interstellar travel, nearbyplanetary systems and interstellardestinations, SETI, artificial intelligenceand space art and music. We’re alsofortunate to have space artist JonLomberg writing the foreword. What doeshe have to say? You’ll have to buy the bookto find out!

A luxurious hard cover book, Beyondthe Boundary is priced at £35 and all ofthe money raised will be going toprojects, initiatives and activities relatedto I4IS, which we will be sure to mentionin future issues of Principium so thatreaders can see how the money is beingput to good use.

To pre-order your book, send yourname and e-mail address to us [email protected].

Beyond the BoundaryFancy reading a real page-turner? Here at I4IS that’s what we have comingup, with the publication of our very ownbook, Beyond the Boundary: SeekingInterstellar Destinations, in August. Editedby Kelvin F Long, the book tackles thedifferent aspects and challenges ofinterstellar flight, with each chapterwritten by an I4IS team member, somewho are well known authors, others whoare seeing their words in print for thefirst time as we seek to include a cross-section of our membership and people in society, from scientists and engineersto artists and journalists to enthusiastsand musicians.

Contributing authors include StephenAshworth, Jonathan Brooks, MartinCiupa, Jeremy Clark, Keith Cooper, IanCrawford, Bill Cress, Adam Crowl, DavidFields, Remo Garrattini, AngeloGenovese, David A Hardy, Andreas Hein,Kelvin F Long, Tobias Lugoloobi, Adrian

New RecruitsI4IS are pleased to announce several newteam members who have joined us on ourfantastic interstellar adventure.

First up, we’re delighted to announce thatRobert G Kennedy III has joined I4IS’Board of Directors. Having graduatedfrom California Polytechnic in 1986 with aBSc in mechanical engineering,specialising in robotics and opticalphysics, he designed industrial roboticssystems for Douglas Aircraft Company inLos Angeles and researched artificialintelligence at Oak Ridge NationalLaboratory before setting up his ownbusiness in 1992, a Russian–Americancompany called the Ultimax Group, Inc. It has been engaged in everything fromnuclear science and systems engineeringto military robots, Russian space software,space affairs and missile defense. Aproficient artist and author of non-fiction,he co-organised the 2013 Tennessee ValleyInterstellar Workshop with Les Johnson(see Principium issue 4), has lectured ongeoengineering at the Moscow Academyof Science and has published papers in theJournal of the British Interplanetary Society,Acta Astronautica, Whole Earth Review andSmithsonian Air and Space Magazine. Hewas also technical consultant on the 1998Hollywood movie Deep Impact. A fluentspeaker of Russian, Latin, Greek and

Arabic, he currently works as a seniorsystems engineer at Tetra Tech and withhis skills and expertise will be a valuableaddition to I4IS.

Meanwhile, David Fields has joined as aSenior Researcher. The Director of theTamke–Allan Observatory at Roane StateCommunity College, he is a physicist whohas specialised in health risks fromradionucleotides and has worked withNASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center todesign radiation shields to protectastronauts from excessive radiationexposure from coronal mass ejectionsfrom the Sun, cosmic rays, the Van Allenbelts and nuclear propulsion reactors. He

is also on the board of the Society ofAmateur Radio Astronomers, which iswhere his current research interests lie.

Other new team members includeLondon-based industrial designer TomShirley who will be working on interiorconcepts for a proposed I4IS HQ, MartinCiupa who runs Cybernetics Analytics Ltdin the UK and Singapore and who will beheading up an Interstellar Ethics Group,and George Calder-Potts, who has aMasters degree in Space Technology.

Finally, space propulsion physicist EricW Davis has joined the ranks of I4ISconsultants. One of the pre-eminentnames of advanced propulsion research,Davis was mentored by the legendaryRobert Forward and in 2009 co-editedthe book Frontiers of Propulsion Science. Davis has worked on space missions asvaried as the Voyager probes, theInfrared Astronomy Satellite and variousmilitary satellites. He is currently SeniorResearch Physicist at the Institute forAdvanced Studies at Austin, Texas,where he specialises in breakthroughpropulsion physics.

Robert G Kennedy III


News from the InstituteStarship PhilosophyI4IS’ first official event went down a stormat the British Interplanetary Society inlate May. Entitled ‘The Philosophy of theStarship’, the one-day symposium wasattended by 30 people and featured talkson topics as diverse as ‘the starship as anexpander of minds’, the ethicalimplications of cultural intervention byspace-faring civilisations, ‘futuregeopolitical scenarios and their impact ondeep space, and self-replicating probes.Each presentation was followed by aspirited Q&A and discussion session, withinput from everyone in the audience.

We will have a full report in our next issue.

Project DragonflyAnnounced at the Philosophy of theStarship symposium was ProjectDragonfly, I4IS’ new flagship researchgoal. Named after the Robert LForward’s 1984 science fiction book TheFlight of the Dragonfly (also known asRocheworld), it tells the story of a missionto Barnard’s Star 5.9 light years away tovisit a twin planet – Rocheworld – wherethe two atmospheres are actuallytouching and the planets stretched intoellipsoids by their mutual gravitationalattraction. More pertinently thestarship, named Prometheus, flew toBarnard’s Star using a laser sail, wheremighty 1,500 terawatt lasers are focusedthrough a gigantic lens towards thereceding starship, imparting momentumonto its enormous sails to accelerate it toa fifth of the speed of light.

Project Dragonfly is therefore aninitiative to develop laser-sail propulsiondemonstrators. The aim is to start with aground vacuum chamber demonstratorand then to move towards testing with

London CallingThe 2014 World Science Fiction

Convention is taking place in London atthe Excel Centre from Thursday 14 toMonday 18 August 2014 – notable forbeing the convention at which the famousHugo Awards are handed out. This is aunique opportunity for the Institute forInterstellar Studies to reach out to someof the most imaginative people on thisplanet. Science fiction has been aninspiration to many in the Institute and inturn we’d like to inspire the fans, writers,publishers, editors and stars from theworlds of games, film and television whowill be at the convention.

I4IS is already planning to have apresence at the convention, which willalso be known as ‘Loncon 3’. Aside fromexhibiting and perhaps giving talks, therewill be plenty of informal networking andthat’s where you come in! Please considerfitting the convention into your travelplans for next year. This is an opportunityto both experience the unique creativeand mind-expanding atmosphere of aWorld Science Fiction Convention and toalso help raise the profile of I4IS. Or justcome along to say hello to us whilemingling with the stars of science fiction!

If you are considering coming thenplease get in touch with John Davies [email protected] or find him atuk.linkedin.com/in/jiduk/.

cubesats (see Issue 1 and ProjectCATSTAR). The ultimate aim is to one day see a low mass, high conceptmission launched into deep space, pastthe Oort Cloud and beyond, in thedirection of the stars.

“Robert Forward pioneered thedevelopment of propellant-less solutionsfor interstellar flight and, like thePrometheus of his story, this excitingproject will point the way to the stars,” saysI4IS Executive Director Kelvin F Long.

I4IS are currently in the process ofbuilding the Dragonfly team and morewill be announced next issue.

An artist’s impression of a light sail beingpushed by laser. Image: MichaelCarroll/Planetary Society.

Professor Ian Crawford spells out how designing starships can help expand humanity’shorizons. Image credit: Kelvin F Long.


COMMUNITY The community pages for the interstellar cognoscenti

Starship Century Symposium Takes FlightJames Benford describes two fascinating days in May when interstellar science touched downat the Arthur C Clarke Center for Human Imagination in San Diego in association with a newbook, Starship Century.

Our principal goal for the book StarshipCentury was to collect the visions ofinterstellar thinking across the spectrumfrom physical, biological and othertechnical areas as well as social, politicaland humanistic perspectives. Thatincludes essays, science fiction and evensome poetry.

Our second objective was to fundinterstellar research with the profits fromthe book. Therefore, for both of thosereasons, we wanted to make a book thatwould be widely read, i.e. to communicatethe perspective of 2013 on starships and

and the interplanetary economy essentialto build them to, frankly, sell a lot of booksso that research can be done to advancethe visions.

With the book well defined, we got intouch with the new Arthur C ClarkeCenter for Human Imagination at theUniversity of California, San Diego, whichwas looking for a kick-off event that wouldattract a broad audience. Our bookseemed to be an obvious choice. Weorganised the symposium very much alongthe lines of the book; the overlap betweensymposium participants and bookparticipants was very high.

The location was on the beautiful UCSan Diego campus in La Jolla where mybrother and I entered as physicsgraduate students 50 years ago.Attendance was quite high; the ClarkeCenter cut off registration at 338. It wasthe largest interstellar meeting that willoccur this year.

The attendees were quite stellar.Everyone was glad Freeman Dyson wasthere. Freeman turns 90 this year, is thesubject of a very good new biography andmany of us wanted to be photographedwith him.

On the science policy side we hadFreeman Dyson, Paul Davies, RobertZubrin and Peter Schwartz, the futurist.On the science side, John Cramer onexotic ‘warp-drive’ propulsion, AdamCrowl on pioneering starship ideas, GeoffLandis on nuclear rockets and IanCrawford on destinations for starships andmyself on beam-driven sails. Jill Tartermoderated a panel shown in theaccompanying photo. On the sciencefiction side there was my brother Greg,Neal Stephenson, Allen Steele, JoeHaldeman, David Brin, Richard Lovett,Larry Niven and Vernor Vinge.

Space Towers and New SpaceThe first day started with the

perspectives of Schwartz, Dyson, Zubrinand Stephenson. Peter Schwartz used hisfuture thinking methods to argue that theseveral classes of possible fates ofmankind mean that, though we may bedriven by religion or by great nations or bythe funding of trillionaires, starships arealmost inevitable.

Neal Stephenson gave his view thatcivilisation isn't thinking big anymore andshowed the work of his team on thepossibility of constructing a tower 20kilometres tall. This represents a bigengineering challenge, forces theconsideration of new factors such asadding airfoils to towers, would give us anew perspective and could haveapplications such as launch-to-orbit and atethering base for a space elevator. Histheme was the nonlinear potential of bigideas. For example, the USA built thePanama Canal, which aside from inter-ocean transport also supplies all theelectrical power for Panamahydroelectrically.

In the afternoon we had several talkson how to develop the Solar system in thenear term as a prelude to launchingstarships. Of particular interest was Chris

Getting to the target stars: (L–R) Ian Crawford, Geoff Landis, Bob Zubrin, Paul Davies and Adam Crowl come together for a panel, moderated by the SETI Institute’s Jill Tarter (not shown). All images credit: JamesBenford/Starship Century.

Physicists Freeman Dyson andGeoffrey Landis.

Lewicki of Planetary Resources, whodescribed their ambitious plans and howthey intend to make money on spaceresources. Chris then joined a panel,moderated by Peter Schwartz, made up ofDyson, Stephenson, Steele and Landisdiscussing the future of what is now called‘New Space’.

Because the book went on sale at thesymposium for the first time, that eveningand the following evening editors andauthors of the book Starship Centurysigned copies. We sold about 200 books inthe two days.

The morning of the second day focusedon how to actually build starships: earlyideas, beam-driven sails, nuclear rocketsand exotic propulsion. As the day went on,a sort of harmony developed among theparticipants. I think it was because theywere getting to know each other and couldwork together to explore ideas. In theafternoon, Paul Davies cautioned aboutthe complexities of interacting biologies:‘Can we Survive Alien Biospheres?’ Jill

Tarter moderated a terrific panel on‘Getting to the Target Stars’ with IanCrawford, Geoff Landis, Bob Zubrin, PaulDavies and Adam Crowl. Meanwhile,Gregory Benford moderated a panel ofscience fiction writers: Joe Haldeman,David Brin, Larry Niven, Vernor Vingeand Jon Lomberg.

Jon Lomberg gave the final talk, a realstem-winder that urged us to considerourselves ‘Citizens of the Galaxy’ and gavea crowd-pleasing description of hismarvelous Galaxy Garden, a model of ourgalaxy 100 feet across, located on the BigIsland of Hawaii (look it over athttp://www.galaxygarden.net). His talkwas interrupted several times by applause.

Toward the Grandest HorizonThere was agreement on the

proposition of the symposium that, nowthat the initial reconnaissance of the SolarSystem has been conducted (a probe willfly past Pluto two years from now),exploring beyond the Solar System byrobotic or crewed starships, beginningwith precursor probes, is the next horizonfor civilisation.

The symposium ended on a verypositive note; several people asked me ifwe were going to hold another one infuture. In fact we're working on havinganother Starship Century Symposium inLondon at the British InterplanetarySociety with a tentative date of 20 October.

That evening David and Cheryl Brinhad a wonderful party for many of theparticipants at their home. Aboutexploring the stars, David feels that “Fewassumptions will hold true out there —even when we find nice, warm, wateryworlds with nitrogen–oxygenatmospheres. For one thing, such anatmosphere can only have been producedby life… locally evolved and far fitter forlocal conditions than our dauntlesssettlers will be. Either the local biome willbe incompatible with ours, in which casethere will either be conflict or parallelecosystems – or else compatibility willmean we can find plenty to eat in the newrealm… but then they will be able to preyon us.”

For further discussion of thissymposium and its aftermath, buzz andblogs about the symposium, and excerptsfrom the book, see the websitehttp://www.starshipcentury.com. Thesymposium videos of all the talks can beviewed there, too.


Science fiction author NealStephenson raised the prospect of a20-kilometre tall tower as anexample of ‘big engineering’,reminiscent of Jon Lomberg’sEarthport painting (see last issue!).

The SETI Institute’s Jill Tarter

Allen Steele, a science fiction authorwho featured in a panel, ‘The Futureof New Space’ with Freeman Dyson,Chris Lewicki, Neal Stephenson,Geoff Landis and Peter Schwartz.

Chris Lewicki of the asteroid-prospecting company PlanetaryResources, who gave an overview ofthe steps towards mining asteroids.

Jon Lomberg, visionary.


Icarus’ Starship Congress Gets Kick-started

Congratulations to Icarus Interstellar,who ran a wildly successful fundraisingcampaign on Kickstarter for their epicStarship Congress, taking place in Dallas,Texas on 15–18 August. With the aim ofraising $10,000, in the space of a monththe campaign exceeded expectations andraised a whopping $15,831, with 276people pledging amounts from as small as$5, all the way up to $600.

The Starship Congress is set to becomeone of the biggest events of its kind, withthe world’s leading spacecraft designers,

theorists and engineers, representativesfrom international space programmes andcommercial space operators, interstellarspeakers and members of the publicconvening at the Hilton Anatole.Confirmed speakers include I4IS’Executive Director Kelvin F Long,Technical Director Andreas Hein andconsultants Dr James Benford ofMicrowave Sciences, Inc and Dr EricDavis, as well as the originator of thegravitational assist manoeuvre DrMichael Minovitch, Icarus Interstellar’sAndreas Tziolas, NASA’s Harold ‘Sonny’

If you want to see an extended versionof the thoughts discussed in thesymposium, and the science fiction aboutstarship ideas, get and read the bookStarship Century, available in paperbacknow and in e-book in August [we’ll alsofeature a review of it in an upcoming issue– Ed]. Between now and then, about twothirds of the purchase price of the bookwill go directly to fund interstellarresearch.

You can buy a special release of theprinted book at the book’s website or athttps://www.createspace.com/4240458.

About the authorJames Benford is President of

Microwave Sciences in Layafette,California. His research includes highpower microwave systems ad nuclearfusion, and in 2000 he led a team thatdemonstrated the first flight of photon-driven carbon sails using microwavebeams.

James BenfordThe cover to the Starship Century book,featuring such illustrious authors asStephen Baxter, James and GregoryBenford, David Brin, Freeman Dyson,Stephen Hawking, Paul Davies, JoeHaldeman, Martin Rees and many more!You can order your copy from herehttps://www.createspace.com/4240458,or from regular book shops after itspublic launch date of 20 August.

White on his ‘warp drive’ research, DrRachel Armstrong on Project Persephone,Dr Armen Papazian on ‘Money Mechanicsfor Space’, Srikanth Reddy on fusionpowered starships, and many more! Viewthe full speaker schedule here:http://www.icarusinterstellar.org/congress-schedule/.

Tickets are still available to attend theCongress, with regular attendees pricedat $100 and students with a valid studentID at $50. Register now atwww.icarusinterstellar.org/congress-registration/.


One possible destination for our firstinterstellar flight may not actually existafter all. Late last year astronomers atGeneva Observatory, led by XavierDumusque, claimed the existence of aroughly Earth-sized body orbiting alphaCentauri B, one of twin stars in the closeststellar system to our own. However, a newassessment of the data by astronomerArtie Hatzes of Thuringian StateObservatory in Germany finds that theplanet has gone missing.

The existence for alpha Centauri Bb,which is purported to orbit its star at adistance of just 5.98 million kilometrescompared to Earth’s 149.6 millionkilometres from the Sun, was alwaystentative. Dumusque’s team had used oneof our best planet-finding devices, theHigh Accuracy Radial velocity PlanetFinder (HARPS) at the EuropeanSouthern Observatory in Chile, to make450 measurements of the star’s radialvelocity – the characteristic motion of aplanet moving slightly towards and awayfrom us as it wobbles around a centre ofmass with an orbiting planet. In the caseof alpha Centauri Bb, that motion was just51 centimetres per second – an incrediblemeasurement given that the alphaCentauri system is 4.3 light years awayand right at the bleeding edge of ourplanet-finding capabilities.

Which means that the planet’sdetection was always a provisional one, afact even admitted by Dumusque whenthe planet was announced. In order to findthe planet’s tiny signal, one has to stripaway any other incidental signals,described as ‘jitter’, caused by activitysuch as starspots, stellar convection,prominences and so on. As alpha CentauriB is remarkably Sun-like (90 percent themass of the Sun, 87 percent the radius,only half the luminosity and about 300degrees cooler at the photosphere, i.e. thevisible surface) it is easier to model suchactivity based on our knowledge of ourown nearby star. When Dumusque’s teamapplied the jitter reduction to the entiredataset, they were left with anunexplained 51 centimetre per secondsignal. However, when Hatzes broke thedataset up into smaller parts beforeapplying jitter reduction, he found theplanet signal vanished. To make sure hewasn’t making a mistake, he ran the sameprocess through simulated datasets that

carried a signal of the same magnitude. Inthe simulations, the signal remained. Inthe real data, it didn’t.

Hatzes interpretation is still aspreliminary as the claim for the planet’sexistence. For his own part, Dumusque ishappy with Hatzes’ work and both agreethat the only way to get a definitive answereither way is to make more measurementsto improve the statistical analysis.

What would it mean for our possibleinterstellar destination should alphaCentauri Bb turn out to be a ghost? Itwould not necessarily mean there are noplanets in the alpha Centauri system.The claimed alpha Centauri Bb, if itexists, is very small but crucially veryclose to its star, meaning the radialvelocity effect is more pronounced.Planets, large or small, that are furtherout from the star would still be very hardfor us to detect – perhaps impossiblewith our current capabilities.Furthermore, there may be stars aroundalpha Centauri A, or even thecompanion red dwarf, Proxima. Over thenext decade new planet-hunters willcome online, including ESPRESSO,which is HARPS successor, the NextGeneration Transit Survey and TESS,NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet SurveySatellite, which will have greatersensitivity in the quest for Earth-likeplanets around the nearest stars.

Alpha Centauri’s disappearing planetADVANCES

An artist’s impression of the ‘maybe’planet, alpha Centauri Bb, alongside itsvital statistics. Image: PHL@UPRArecibo.

SKYLON is £60 million richer

The British-designed SKYLON spaceplanereceived a dramatic boost in June when itwas announced that the UK Governmentwould be pumping £60 million intoReaction Engines Ltd’s development ofSKYLON’s revolutionary SABRE engine.The funding comes on the back of criticaltests proving SABRE to be a viabletechnology (see issue three of Principium).

SKYLON, when built, will be able totake off on a runway like a normalaeroplane and climb to an altitude of 26kilometres at over Mach 5 using SABRE, aSynergistic Air-Breathing Rocket Engine,before switching to a conventional liquidoxygen rocket to take it the rest of the wayinto space. Like a normal jet engine itsweeps up oxygen from the air around it,but at such high velocities the air enteringSABRE becomes rapidly heated to over athousand degrees, which makes it far lessefficient. SABRE overcomes this by usingliquid hydrogen to cool the air. UKChancellor of the Exchequer, GeorgeOsborne, was suitably impressed toinclude the £60 million in his budget. “Justseen SABRE – a rocket engine that coolsair from 1,000 degrees to –150 in fractionof a second. We’re backing the future with£60m funding,” he tweeted.

The money won’t be enough to fullyfund SABRE and SKYLON but it ishoped that the Government funding will not only allow SABRE’s developmentto continue, but will also attract othersources of funding. Reaction Engines’Alan Bond estimates that the cost of theentire development project will be £7 billion, with each spaceplane thencost £700 million to construct. TheSKYLON, which will initially be built tohaul cargo into orbit, could also beadapted to carry astronauts, or takepassengers from London to Sydney injust four hours. Easy access into orbit isdeemed crucial for helping to build anindustrial and economic infrastructurein space that can act as a frameworkaround which to build interplanetaryand interstellar exploration.


Two NASA missions have in recentyears been busily monitoring levels ofradiation in deep space as they have goneabout their business. On its way to Marsbetween 2011 and 2012, the Curiosityrover experienced a glut of radiationpervading the inner Solar System beyondthe Earth’s protective magnetosphere,while the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiterexploring the Moon has also measured theradiation dose it is being exposed to.

The radiation comes from two sources:solar flares and coronal mass ejectionsthat spew solar energetic particles (SEPs)into space, and galactic cosmic rays thatare accelerated to high energies insidesupernovae remnants. To a point SEPs canbe avoided – close monitoring of the Suncan warn of any dangerous mass ejections,allowing time for evasive manoeuvres or to

batten down the hatches and seek shelter,but on the other hand cosmic rayspenetrate the Solar System randomlyfrom all directions, moving with highenergies that can easily penetrate aspacecraft’s meagre shielding. It is cosmicrays that will provide the radiation dangerfor interstellar voyagers moving beyondthe Solar System’s magnetic heliosphere(see the Voyager retrospective in issue 2 of Principium).

Curiosity’s Radiation AssessmentDetector (RAD) measured a radiationdose of 330 milliSieverts over a six monthperiod. To put that into context,astronauts on the International SpaceStation receive 100 milliSieverts during asix month stay in space. Alternatively, theradiation levels are like experiencing a fullbody CT scan once every week. Over

longer timescales, a dose of one Sievertduring a lifetime leads to a five percentincrease in the chances of getting cancer –NASA are happy with a risk factor of threepercent for their astronauts.

So these doses, reported in the 31 May2013 edition of the journal Science, are notso high as to be definitely lethal; indeed,an astronaut still has a very good chanceof not falling ill. However, for NASA tosend astronauts to Mars the radiationdosage will have to be reduced somehow,while for future interstellar travellers theexposure over many years in deep space isstill a problem that awaits a solution. CaryZeitlin of the South-west ResearchInstitute in Boulder, Colorado, suggeststhat materials with high hydrogen content– such as water or even certain foods thatastronauts could store around theirquarters – make the best radiation shields,far better than ineffectual aluminium.This tallies with what the LunarReconnaissance Orbiter discovered; it’sown radiation experiment, the CosmicRay Telescope or the Effects of Radiation(CRaTER), found that plastics, whichcontain large amounts of hydrogen, dohave some effect in blocking radiation.

Ultimately the best way to defendagainst radiation is simply to lessen theexposure time by reaching a givendestination faster using advancedpropulsion. Consequently research intopropulsion concepts with which to go tothe stars could be pioneered within theSolar System in an effort to beat theeffects of radiation. Suddenly those toyspacecraft we had as children don’t seemthat unrealistic anymore – to the stars in aplastic spaceship!

Astronauts heading into deep space are going to need some extraprotection from space weather – but the forecast isn’t too terrible.

Comparing the dose equivalent of radiation humans may come across on Earth, andthe radiation dosage experienced by the Curiosity rover (MSL, Mars ScienceLaboratory, the name for the combined rover and its spacecraft). Image: NASA/JPL–Caltech/SwRI.

The Inspiration Mars team, led byDennis Tito, still maintain that theradiation hazard to astronauts is not toogreat to prevent a manned fly-by of thered planet with current propulsion andshielding technology. Image: Inspiration Mars.

Space Radiation Gets Serious


As I4IS’ Honorary InterstellarMusician, The Light Dreams,a.k.a. Alex Storer, specialisesin electronic space soundsthat take the listener to otherworlds and other times.Coupled with his evocativebrand of fantastic futuristicart, he spearheads a new waveof creators that are capturingour interstellar dreams oncanvas and in sound.Principium spoke to Alex abouthis work and his inspirations.

Principium: Electronic music really came to the fore in the 1970sand 1980s. How did you come toproduce electronic music for thetwenty-first century?

Alex: I guess you could say I’m one ofthe new generation of independent artistsmaking professional sounding music fromthe comforts of a home studio. …I'msoftware-based, which suits my way ofworking, as I see my music as an extensionof my digital artwork. I've no formalmusical training at all, I've simply learntalong the way, out of passion andenthusiasm. I've been working under thename 'The Light Dreams since 2006.However, I had fiddled around with musicsoftware in the past – I had a CommodoreAmiga back in the day, with a programcalled OctaMED that was an eight-trackstudio. I made my first ever demos withthat. My career in graphic design tookover after that, but the urge to try myhand at music more seriously never reallywent away.

Since 2006 I’ve probably made close to20 albums worth of material [Alex hasreleased seven albums so far]. Most ofthem are demo albums in which I wastrying to find out what I could do. Itwasn’t until I made an album called IntoThe Light in 2007 that I thought, “a-ha,I’m hitting the right track here,” andthat also coincided with the time I gotinto contact with [the space artist] DavidA Hardy, who allowed me to use some ofhis artwork on the album cover.

Principium: You recently releasedan album named Future Worlds, inassociation with I4IS. What willlisteners experience when listeningto Future Worlds?

Alex: Partly escapism, and I think thatis what appeals to a lot of fans of sciencefiction, the ability to be transported toanother time, another world, anotherplace. As the album’s title suggests, Iwanted each track to represent adifferent future scenario, whether it isabout mankind draining the Earth’sresources, whether it is about interstellartravel, or whether it is about climatechange, and all these things arerecurrent throughout the album as wellas the influence of various books I haveread along the way, such as Arthur CClarke’s The City and the Stars. But thegreat thing about instrumental music isthat you can interpret it as you want. Ithink it’s my best work to date on anumber of levels. Anyone who likesatmospheric or instrumental music willhopefully appreciate it.

Principium: Why do you think therea link between space music andelectronic music?

Alex: It might be the technologicalaspect of it. In space films thesoundtracks tend to be either quite

experimental, like ClintMansell’s soundtrack to Moon, which Ithought was brilliant even though it wasvery minimal, or they are fullyorchestral, but every now and then youdo get electronic stuff which seems moreappropriate because it is other-worldly.You get a lot of alien sounds in it andthings that you can’t do with anorchestra.

Principium: Do you have any favouritemusic associated with space?

Alex: Jean Michel Jarre’s Oxygène isone of my all-time favourite albums. Ialways associated that album with space,but it’s not about space at all, it is aboutpollution. There was also an album myfather had that I liked a lot, which wasan LP of space themes with a funkyapproach, recorded by Geoff Love andhis orchestra. Although it sounds slightlycomical in places, that album introducedme to a lot of famous SF film andtelevision themes. I think Daft Punk’sTron: Legacy soundtrack has been thebest thing I’ve heard in recent years; Idon’t remember hearing such aninteresting fusion between orchestraland electronic music in a film soundtrackbefore, which was one of my inspirationsfor Future Worlds. It was something that Ithought would be interesting to trybecause up to that point I’d only evermade purely electronic-sounding music.Last year, when David Hardy was makinghis English edit of the Russian film TheRoad to the Stars, he asked me if I wasinterested in making a new soundtrackfor it, but he wanted it to be orchestralrather than electronic, which was newterritory for me. Luckily I had justbought a virtual orchestra and thesounds are so authentic and powerfulthat it sounds just like you have a fullorchestra in your room. I enjoyed usingthose symphonic sounds so much that Idecided to use some of them on FutureWorlds. My original idea was for thealbum to be primarily orchestral with asubtle electronic undercurrent, but itturned out more the opposite! Theorchestral aspect is something I'mlooking forward to exploring further inmy music.

The art of music

Alex Storer, a.k.a. The Light Dreams.

I don’t work in very conventionalways. To me music is just like paintingjust with sounds instead of colours

Principium: You are also an artist.Do you often paint andsimultaneously write a piece ofmusic to go with it?

Alex: Yeah, it happens both ways.Atmosphere and mood are the prevailingfeatures in my music, which are thesame elements I aspire to evoke in myartwork. Sometimes I'll make a piece ofmusic and think “oh, I could paint that,”and other times, as was the case with thecover art of Future Worlds [named ‘TheWorld Outside’], the concept comes first.I’ll often start off with a title, because Idon’t have lyrics, I think about whatmood, what scenario I want to put intothe song. When I was writing FutureWorlds I had the phrase ‘The WorldOutside’ in my head, which could leadoff into all sorts of directions. I wantedto do a painting and music with thattitle, so the title came first, then themusic [listen here:http://thelightdreams.bandcamp.com/track/the-world-outside], then thepainting. I wanted the cover art of FutureWorlds to pay homage to yesterday’svisions of tomorrow – to visually sitalongside those classic album covers andvintage SF paperbacks of the 1970s.

Principium: Have you tried yourhand at starship art?

Alex: Starship art is one of the thingson my to-do list. I was looking at someJohn Berkey artwork recently [whopainted many of the Star Wars filmposters] and thought it was about time Itried something like that. It’s one of theareas I’ve not ventured into yet so I’mkeen to have a go. One of my favouritepaintings is called ‘Big Dog’, which wasinspired by a Brian Aldiss novel, NonStop, and features only a portion of thespaceship on it. But I think if I was goingto do a good starship painting I wouldneed a good design. These days a lot ofspace art is done with 3D software,which is great because it is so muchmore realistic and accurate, butpersonally, I prefer something that hasthe touch of the artist’s hand to it. A

painting has to evoke emotions andportray the artist’s personality, and youdon’t really get that with 3D as an artform. If you look at John Berkey’spaintings, they’re often of a very roughstyle, but it works a treat.

Principium: Finally, what does yourmusic mean to you?

Alex: One of my fondest childhoodmemories is listening to my fatherplaying music by artists like Jean MichelJarre and Mike Oldfield, while I’d bestaring out into space through this greatbig print of a painted alien landscapethat we had on the wall at home. Thecombination of that kind of musicseemed to gel perfectly with the worldpresented to me by the painting – whichturned out to be ‘Stellar Radiance’ byDavid A Hardy!

It feels like everything has come full-circle and fallen into place for me, as I’mnow producing my own music andscience fiction art, plus I’ve become goodfriends with David Hardy. My musiccertainly feels like it’s found its idealhome within I4IS.


Alex Storer’s painting, ‘The World Outside’, which also appeared as the cover artworkfor his album, Future Worlds

Future Worlds is available now on mp3from Amazon (worldwide) and iTunesas well as Alex’s own Bandcamp page,http://thelightdreams.bandcamp.com/where it comes with two exclusivebonus tracks and an illustratedbooklet with a specially writtenintroduction by David A Hardy.

You can also listen to tracks andpurchase Alex’s other albums. Alexhas pledged his support to I4IS bydonating a percentage of all sales ofFuture Worlds.

The Light Dreams' latest release, After Hours, is a compilation ofpreviously unreleased tracks. Alex iscurrently working on two new albumprojects that he hopes to release inthe Autumn. Alex also wrote a track-by-track introduction to Future Worldson our Interstellar Index blog,http://www.interstellarindex.com/2013/03/02/future-worlds-track-by-track-by-alex-storer/.

You can also see Alex’s super artworkon his homepage,www.thelightdream.net.


Jon Lomberg’s Starship adventures

Last issue we featured the first half of famed space artist Jon Lomberg’s eagerly anticipatedStarship series. This issue we present – exclusively – the remaining six images in thiswonderful series following the voyage of a living ‘petal’ starship and the civilisation thatevolves with it.

Black holes are one of the trueenigmas of the Universe. Feared fortheir ferocious appetites anddestructive potential, their powerfulgravity able to bend the path of lightlike a lens, they’ve perhaps got aslightly undeserved reputation. Blackholes can also have their uses, fromproviding energy sources in theiraccretion discs of gas swirling aroundthem, to computing power andperhaps, with some exotic physics,even acting as doorways to otherUniverses. Whether one wouldsurvive such a journey into a blackhole is another matter entirely.

A variation of Lomberg’s living petalship – a shell ship, grown to prosperin the vacuum of space. SaysLomberg, “I got interested in doingpaintings where I took biological, ormarine, or other kinds of imagery andcombined them with astronomy.”


Actually an idea from the brilliant mind of Freeman Dyson, comet trees would literally be enormous plants designed to survive in deepspace. “You have a comet nucleus, where you have all this ice, a cubic mile, and genetically engineer these trees so that they canexist in a vacuum. You grow them out, for miles, and you live in the trees and they become your ship,” says Lomberg.


Art copyright Jon Lomberg 2013.You can order signed prints of thisartwork, and the first half of his Starship series as featured last issue, at http://www.jonlomberg.com/ss_gallery1.html

Jon Lomberg’s narrative of the futurecontinues to describe how humanity, ina range of biological starships wheremind literally merges with organic,space-dwelling machines, explore theGalaxy at large in peace, ushering in anew utopia. Can interstellar flight helpexpand the the human mind towardspeace and knowledge, reminiscent ofOlaf Stapledon’s Starmaker? “I think thatthis is the potential of intelligent life andcivilisation, to have the capacity to reachthis Stapledon, Arthur Clarke-type futurewhere we evolve into this higher being,”says Lomberg.


Is it possible to detectevidence of extraterrestrialartifacts and technology?I4IS joins the search for alienintelligence with its ownunique spin on things.

When the first interstellar mission islaunched from Earth towards anotherstar, it’s going to open up a whole can ofworms for SETI, the search forextraterrestrial intelligence. As long asradio communication is still our primaryway of reaching out to other worlds,SETI seems content with spending themajority of its time searching for radiobeacons directed towards us. However,when our first starship sets sail for alphaCentauri or somewhere similar, SETI isgoing to have no choice but to confrontan issue it has been dodging for over fifty years.

Yes, the Fermi Paradox is well-wornnow, but as our interstellar capabilitiesdevelop it is only going to grow morepertinent. To understand why, let’smomentarily digress. It is the year 1950and, five years after the bomb wasdropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, theLos Alamos National Labs in New

Mexico are working feverishly ondeveloping the ability to wield evengreater atomic power. The best scientistson hand to the United States are here,many European who had adopted theUnited States as their home while warand fascism raged in Europe.

One such scientist was Italian-bornEnrico Fermi. Sat in the canteen at LosAlamos one lunchtime, reading ahumorous cartoon in The New Yorkerabout flying saucers abducting municipal

trash bins that seemed to have beengoing missing from the city, Fermi askedhis now-famous rhetorical question,“where are they?” His logic was that theUniverse was more than old enough forintelligent life to have already arisensomewhere in the Galaxy and spreadthroughout the stars, colonisingeverywhere including Earth. That theyare not here has been deemed a paradox,by some at least, assumingextraterrestrial life exists. Yet it wouldbe no paradox at all if it could be shownthat interstellar travel was eitherimpossible or unfeasible. In the 1970sthe British Interplanetary Society’sProject Daedalus (see issue one)suggested that there were nofundamental barriers blocking the roadto the stars – the great distances andtimescales involved are notinsurmountable, particularly to roboticprobes. However, a paper design, as goodas it may be, is no substitute for reallylaunching an interstellar mission. Whenthose first starships begin their voyage,there will be no doubt about it; if humancivilisation can go interstellar, then sotoo could other technologically advancedcivilisations. So we’re back to Fermi’squestion: where are they?

Perhaps they’re on their way.

If so, how could we recognise their

Retrospective: The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence

Our radio telescopes wait and listen for a sign that we are not alone. Image: NRAO/AUI.

A starship’s ‘exhaust’ may be visible for many light years – would it provide an evenmore powerful SETI signal than a radio beacon? Image: Adrian Mann, www.bisbos.com.


approach? That’s the mission behindProject Sentinel (SEarch for Non-Terrestrial Intelligence Near EarthLightyears), an I4IS proposal toinvestigate what the signatures ofapproaching ships would look likespectroscopically. In all fairness, it mightsound a little crazy at first, but if youaccept that we are looking to buildstarships, then the same has to beassumed for other civilisations. To beclear, this is not about looking for flyingsaucers but rather about addressingaspects of the Fermi Paradox. In 1995the Mars Society’s Robert Zubrin wrote apaper discussing the possibility ofdetecting an advanced extraterrestrialcivilisation by way of the exhaust of theirstarships. Zubrin liked the idea for SETIbecause the power required to drive astarship is many orders of magnitudeabove that required merely tocommunicate with radio waves andtherefore a starship signature mighthave a far greater range than traditionalmeans of interstellar communication.Zubrin describes an optimum situationwherein an antimatter-powered starshipproducing 120,000 terawatts with theexhaust pointed roughly towards us(although not necessarily moving away; itcould be moving towards us but hasreversed its engine to provide retrorockets and deceleration) would shine asa seventeenth magnitude object at adistance of one light year, visible toamateur astronomers using CCD

cameras. Meanwhile, the Hubble SpaceTelescope could see the vehicle at adistance of 300 light years and theexhaust would look spectroscopicallydifferent to stars in that it would containno hydrogen lines in its spectra.

Another alternative is that they’vealready reached us but, instead ofcolonising Earth or strip-mining theOort Cloud and Asteroid Belt (and whois to say that they haven’t already beenand taken some of our asteroidalresources before moving on? Someasteroid and Kuiper belts around otherstars have far more mass than the beltsin our Solar System – for example, in2005 the Spitzer Space Telescope showedthat the star HD 69830 has an asteroidbelt 20 times more massive than the beltin our Solar System), they have happilysettled down to monitor Earth from adistance, perhaps on the Moon or at aLagrange point. Or perhaps they brokedown and there is a wreck somewhere inthe Solar System. Along these linesProfessor Paul Davies, Director ofBEYOND: Center for FundamentalConcepts in Science at Arizona StateUniversity, discussed what he coined‘archaeological SETI’ in his book TheEerie Silence, which promoted the idea ofsearching the Solar System for a hiddenprobe, or evidence that a probe hadpassed this way once, long ago.

Of course, seeing the blazing exhaustof a fusion powered starship will notproduce a message like radiocommunication would, other than informus that the extraterrestrials have accessto star-flight and were on their way. Itwould at least give us time to prepare forcontact, unlike another activity that hasspun itself off at a tangent from SETI.

Making Earth visible

As the name implies, SETI is aboutsearching for a voice from the stars.However in 1974 Frank Drake – one ofthe fathers of modern-day SETI – andCarl Sagan embarked on a quitedifferent project, using the giant Areciboradio antenna in Puerto Rico to transmita message towards the globular clusterMessier 13, around 25,000 light yearsaway. The signal contains 1,679 binarydigits that, when translated, depict arectangular strip 73 rows by 23 columnsin size, upon which are crude images of ahuman figure, the Solar System and the

Arecibo telescope, as well as a DNAdouble helix, the numbers one to ten andthe atomic numbers of the elements thatmake up DNA.

Messier 13 is so far away that it wouldtake 50,000 years to receive a reply, notthat globular clusters are likely to behome to life as we know it, filled as theyare with densely packed ancient starswith primitive abundances of heavyelements. Furthermore, it has since beenstated that the message was a stunt toillustrate Arecibo’s capabilities ratherthan any serious attempt tocommunicate. Nevertheless, theprecedent was set. Martin Ryle, theAstronomer Royal at the time, wasconcerned enough to write to both Drakeand the International AstronomicalUnion to request a moratorium onbeaming messages into space until thematter of its potential consequences hadbeen discussed. Ryle was ignored and thepractice of sending messages into spacewith the intention of making contactcontinues in ad hoc fashion today, mostlythrough the work of Alexander Zaitsev ofthe Russian Academy of Sciences in

The cartoon from The New Yorker thatprompted Enrico Fermi to ask hisfamous question.

When those first starships setvoyage, there will be no doubt about it;if human civilisation can gointerstellar, then so toocould other technologicallyadvanced civilisations.

The Arecibo Radio Telescope in PuertoRico, which beamed a message to M13in 1974. Image: NAIC–AreciboObservatory/NSF.

A laser shines forth into the sky as partof the adaptive optics system of theVery Large Telescope in Chile. In thefuture, even more powerful lasers couldbe pointed towards the stars as ameans of communication. Image:ESO/Y Beletsky.


Moscow, but also most recently by theLone Signal project, which is funded bycrowd-sourcing and includes astronomerJacob Haqq-Misra of Penn StateUniversity on its team. Currently theyare transmitting from the 30-metreJamesburg Earth Station in Californiaand their plan is to raise $100 million tobuild a network of dishes to continuouslysend messages to various regions of theGalaxy.

The debate as to whether sendingmessages into space is wise, or if thepractice is even scientific, is a lengthyone and a discussion for another time.Instead, another aspect is the question asto whether signals from Earth are evendetectable at interstellar distances akinto the 17.6 light years that the LoneSignal is being transmitted toward thered dwarf Gliese 526.

For example, James Benford and JonBillingham have calculated thattransmissions into space by AlexanderZaitsev using the Evpatoria 70-metredish in the Crimea would only bedetectable as coherent messages by atelescope like the Square KilometreArray out to a distance of 19 light years,while its carrier wave would be visibleout to 648 light years. The size andpower of the Jamesburg Earth Stationwould not seem comparable to Evpatoria,so if any aliens live on a planet aroundGliese 526, they’re going to need areceiver a lot larger than the SquareKilometre Array to detect the datawithin the carrier signal. To be fair,Haqq–Misra acknowledges this, claimingthat the messages could be detected by aten kilometre array radio telescope. Buteven if the Jamesburg transmissions –which aim to be continuous rather thansporadic, meaning energy costs willdemand that their power be kept low –could be picked up by a radio telescope atGliese 526, there is more to the storythan that. Benford has pointed out thatthe transmitter and receiver need to beable to track each other for a long periodof time in order to integrate the signal,but on a rotating planet in a short orbitaround its star, this would be verydifficult indeed without some sort ofspace-based receiver. So while it’s nottotally impossible that the Lone Signalcould be detected, the odds are heavilyweighted against it.

What do these limitations thereforesay about the current radio silence thatSETI is being met with from the skies?Are we simply not hearing anyonebecause we need an extremely largetelescope to do so? Is there any othermode of communication that couldpenetrate deeper than radio? Let’s take a

step back, over 50 years, to the origin ofmodern-day SETI, to better understandradio’s dominance in SETI and how analternative is waiting in the wings.

Five decades of silenceSETI didn’t really kick off until 1959

and a famous paper entitled ‘Searchingfor Interstellar Communications’ byPhilip Morrison and Giuseppe Cocconi ofMassachusetts Institute of Technologythat appeared in Nature describing howradio waves provide the best option forsignalling between the stars. Given thatthe 21cm emission line of interstellarneutral hydrogen gas is routinely probedby astronomers, Morrison and Cocconi’srationale was that ET would recognisethat we would already be observing atthis wavelength and therefore stand thebest chance of detecting a signal therewithout going hunting for it.

The theory was quickly put to the test.Frank Drake, who then was a young radioastronomer at Green Bank Telescope inWest Virginia, USA, independently cameto the same conclusion as Cocconi andMorrison and in April 1960 embarked onProject Ozma – two months of patientlystudying two nearby stars, tau Ceti andepsilon Eridani, for radio signals. Alas,aside from one false alarm when hedetected transmissions from an overheadU2 spy-plane (several months before theGary Powers incident) he detectednothing. Over the past five decadessimilar and yet far more expansivesearches have also failed to turn up aconfirmed extraterrestrial signal, despitenumerous unidentified radiotransmissions. The most famous ofcourse is the ‘Wow!’ signal, observed in1977 by the Big Ear radio telescope –now bulldozed – at the Ohio StateUniversity Radio Observatory. A 72-second pulse of anomalous radioemissions at 1420.455 MHz fromsomewhere in the direction of thegalactic centre in Sagittarius, it was thestrongest narrowband transmission thetelescope had ever seen. Upon seeing thesignal on a subsequent printout, in whichthe transmission was described as asequence of numbers and lettersindicating the rise and fall in intensity asthe sky wheeled above the fixed telescopeand the transmission beam fell into thetelescope’s field-of-view and then backout again, scientist and telescopeengineer Jerry Ehman wrote ‘Wow!’ in

Morrison and Cocconi’s rationalewas that ET would recognise that wewould already be observing at 21cmand therefore would stand the bestchance of detecting a signal therewithout going hunting for it.

The decrypted Arecibo message. Thetop row is the numbers one to ten inbinary. Beneath that (also in binary) arethe atomic numbers of the elementshydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen andphosphorous that make up DNA, andthen in the rows beneath that themolecular formula for DNA nucleotidesare shown, followed by the DNA doublehelix. A crude figure of a human beingfollows, with the average human heighton the left and the size of the humanpopulation in 1974, underneath whichare the planets (including Pluto) withEarth raised above the others, beforefinally ending with a simple depiction ofthe Arecibo telescope and its diameter.


the margin alongside it.

Nobody knows what the signal was,and it has never been heard from again,although the amount of time spent goingback to the location of the Wow! signal(there are no obvious stars at itsposition) has been minimal. Was itterrestrial interference, a radio echobouncing off some of the telescope’ssuperstructure? Was it a naturalphenomenon? Was it a short beacon,cycling between worlds to conserveenergy expenditure? No answers areforthcoming and, unless we detect itagain, are unlikely to ever come, and sothe Wow! signal descends into myth. Yetit is only the most famous of a whole slewof anomalous signals.

Director of SETI research atCalifornia’s SETI Institute, Gerry Harp,says that signals like the Wow! are seenevery day: anomalous bursts of radiotransmission crackling above the static ofthe radio background. These radiotransients could be anything, from blackholes swallowing asteroids to glitches onneutron stars. They could also beartificial signals from intelligentextraterrestrial life. But if these signalsare not seen to repeat – the golden ruleof SETI – then they are disregarded. Andwhen they are seen to repeat, thus farthey have inevitably turned out to be ofnatural, astrophysical origin.

Laser powerAt roughly the same time as when

Drake was deep into Project Ozma, thelaser was being developed by a number ofcompeting scientists. At first, laser powerwas little more than the equivalent of alaser pointer and it wasn’t clear what usethe technology could be. Today, of course,the use of lasers is ubiquitous and theyhave developed to the point that they canproduce tremendous power and carryhuge amounts of encoded data. As suchthoughts have turned to utilising lasersfor interstellar communication and forsearching for similar laser signals fromthe stars, an experiment called ‘OpticalSETI’, or OSETI. For one, laser beamscan be collimated into tightly focusedbeams. There is some spreading, forsure, but not as great as with radiobeams and the bit rate is also far higher– just look at broadband Internet orcable television where information movesat the speed of light as lasers shine downoptical fibres. In 2011 scientists at theKarlsruhe Institute of Technology inGermany succeeded in transmitting 26terabits per second on a single laserbeam by encoding the data onto differentwavelengths of light, and this is still theworld record.

However, optical laser light has atendency to stall when it hits opaqueobjects, such as interstellar clouds of gasand dust, while radio waves can passright through. However, this doesn’t rulelasers out. Instead infrared lasers couldbe applied – as specialist space missionsuch as the infrared-seeking Herscheland Spitzer space telescopes have provenonly too well, infrared light can alsopenetrate through dust and the longerthe wavelength, the more dust it canpass through. The trouble is, infraredradiation is also absorbed by watermolecules – to search for infrared laserpulses then we have to at least perch adesignated search telescope atop thehighest peaks above much of theatmosphere, or better still launch adedicated space telescope.

Unfortunately, with no taxpayer fundingof SETI anywhere in the world, such amission would depend on commercialsponsorship.

It wouldn’t be so hard to producelasers powerful enough to beam to otherstars – we already have them, such as thepetawatt scale lasers that are in use atthe National Ignition Facility at theLawrence Livermore NationalLaboratory, where they are being used to

try and induce nuclear fusion in pelletsof deuterium and tritium. Althoughthere is no sign of success yet, if fusioncan be achieved it will be a boon forstarship concepts since this form offusion, known as Inertial ConfinementFusion, takes up less mass than a bulkymagnetic tokamak and in starshipdesign, mass is all important. And hence,we come full circle in our discussion.

If technologically advancedextraterrestrial civilisations are usingpowerful laser beams to communicateacross space, then those same laserscould provide fusion power, the type ofpower needed to drive starships at asignificant fraction of the speed of lightand permit interstellar travel inreasonable timescales. It’s anotherquandary for the Fermi Paradox. Ofcourse, the paradox makes a whole hostof assumptions about the nature ofextraterrestrial life and intelligence,including that they have the need or thewill to spread into the Galaxy and maketheir presence known. But if they sharein any way our human curiosity and ournature to explore then the paradoxbecomes relevant.

Discussions of interstellar flight andthe search for extraterrestrialintelligence have always shared someDNA. Both look to the stars and towardsthe future of human civilisation. Successin one would be of benefit to the otherand, to that end, perhaps pooling ourresources wouldn’t be such a bad thing.

The print-out of the Wow! signal, withJerry Ehman’s now famous scribbledreaction in the margin. Image: OhioState University Radio Observatory andthe North American AstroPhysicalObservatory (NAAPO).

High-powered lasers in action during fusion tests at the University of Rochester’sLaboratory for Laser Energetics. Image: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Will an extraterrestrial civilisation besending us radio messages, orlaunching starships towards us? Image:David A Aguilar (CfA).

Front Cover Image: Alien SETI, © David A.Hardy / www.astroart.orgBack Cover: The Horsehead Nebula, aregion of dense molecular hydrogen gasaround 1,500 light years away that isforming new stars, imaged in near-infraredlight by the Wide Field Camera 3 onboardthe venerable Hubble Space Telescope.Image: NASA/ESA/Hubble Heritage team(STScI/AURA).

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We'd love to hear from you, our readers,about your thoughts on Principium, theInstitute or interstellar flight in general.Join us on our Facebook page to join inthe [email protected]

Editor: Keith CooperLayout: Adrian Mann

Mission StatementThe mission of the Institute for Interstellar Studies is tofoster and promote education, knowledge and technicalcapabilities which lead to designs, technologies orenterprise that will enable the construction and launch ofinterstellar spacecraft.

Vision StatementWe aspire towards an optimistic future for humans on Earthand in space. Our bold vision is to be an organisation that iscentral to catalysing the conditions in society over the nextcentury to enable robotic and human exploration of thefrontier beyond our Solar System and to other stars, as partof a long-term enduring strategy and towards a sustainablespace-based economy.

Values StatementTo demonstrate inspiring leadership and ethical governance,to initiate visionary and bold programmes co-operating withpartners inclusively, to be objective in our assessments yetkeeping an open mind to alternative solutions, acting withhonesty, integrity and scientific rigour.

The Institute For Interstellar Studies is apending institute in foundational start-up phasesubject to incorporation in the United Kingdom

principium - initiative for interstellar studies · 2019. 11. 30. · principium | issue 5 |...

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