Observations on ‘The Search for Technosignatures: A Review of Possibilities’ I don’t usually post comments at the top of the…
Evolving Strategies in the Search for Extraterrestrial Civilizations Looking for extraterrestrial life in the form of biosignatures will involve peering…
Turbulence Between the Stars We’ve come a long way since the days when interstellar space – and even the environment…
Przybylski’s Star: Still Bizarre After All These Years While I’ve been going through early extraterrestrial ideas like those of Ronald…
A Deeper Dive into the Proxima Centauri Swarm I’m always interested in how work on interstellar concepts gets funded. After…
Moving a Civilization: The Caplan Thruster Because I’ve been talking about enormous structures lately and describing them as ‘big dumb…
Stability of Interstellar ‘Big Dumb Objects’ ‘Big dumb objects’ (BDOs) appear to great effect in science fiction. They come in…
No Signs of Atmosphere on TRAPPIST-1 b or c Waiting to learn what next generation telescopes will reveal is tantalizing…
Interstellar Probes: Moving Beyond Bracewell Lately we’ve been discussing interstellar probes, the kind that an extraterrestrial civilization might use to…
On Artemis and Starshot Watching Artemis lofting skyward I relived the Apollo launches, experiencing feelings that no subsequent missions ever…
Thinking about Bracewell Probes Sometimes I jog my perspective on thorny physics issues by going back to earlier work. At…
Interstellar Choices: Where to Look for Habitability? A recent conversation with a friend who works the futures markets has me…
Biology on a Rogue Planet’s Moon? I don’t write science fiction, but I have several friends who think I do…
Starshot Is a Success (Part II) The second part of Jim Benford’s examination of Breakthrough Starshot concludes our look at…
Starshot Is a Success: Part I The fortunes of Breakthrough Starshot have been the subject of so much discussion not…
The Language of Contact How we think intersects with the language we think in. Consider the verb in classical Greek,…
Propulsion Options for the Solar Gravitational Lens Mission A mission to the Sun’s gravity focus – or more precisely, the…
A Relativistic Explanation for the Dearth of Circumbinary Planets Planets orbiting two stars have been found, but not all that…
Shelter from the Storm The approaching storm will almost certainly cause power outages that will make it impossible to post…
Holography: Shaping a Diffractive Sail One result of the Breakthrough Starshot effort has been an intense examination of sail stability…
Cellular Cosmic Isolation: When the Universe Seeds Life but Civilizations Stay Silent So many answers to the Fermi question have…
Pandora: Exoplanets at Multiple Wavelengths Sometimes we forget how overloaded our observatories are, both in space and on the ground….
Explaining Cloud-9: A Celestial Object Like No Other Some three years ago, the Five-Hundred Meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) in…
A ‘Tatooine’ Planet Directly Imaged I jump at the chance to see actual images – as opposed to light curves…
Building a Library of Science Fiction Film Criticism Back in the days when VCR tapes were how we watched movies…
New Uses for the Eschaton One way to examine problems with huge unknowns – SETI is a classic example –…
Catching Up with TRAPPIST-1 Let’s have a look at recent work on TRAPPIST-1. The system, tiny but rich in planets…
The Rest is Silence: Empirically Equivalent Hypotheses about the Universe Because we so often talk about finding an Earth 2.0,…
The Firefly and the Pulsar We’ve now had humans in space for 25 continuous years, a feat that made the…
Interstellar Mission to a Black Hole We normally think of interstellar flight in terms of reaching a single target. The…
A Reversal of Cosmic Expansion? We all relate to the awe that views of distant galaxies inspire. It’s first of…
Building an Interstellar Philosophy As the AI surge continues, it’s natural to speculate on the broader effects of machine intelligence…
Jupiter’s Impact on the Habitable Zone I’ve been thinking about how useful objects in our own Solar System are when…
Teegarden’s Star b: A Habitable Red Dwarf Planet? I have a number of things to say about Teegarden’s Star and…
A Dark Object or ‘Dark Matter’? We are fortunate enough to be living in the greatest era of discovery in…
Rogue Planets: A Stellar Infancy? How exoplanets emerge from circumstellar disks has always intrigued me, and many open questions remain,…
A Potential Martian Biosignature I’ve long maintained that we’ll find compelling biosignatures on an exoplanet sooner than we’ll find them…
Exoplanets: Refining the Target List I wasn’t surprised to learn that the number of confirmed exoplanets had finally topped 6,000,…
SETI Odds and Ends I’m catching up with a lot of papers in my backlog, prompted by a rereading yesterday…
Stitching the Stars: Graphene’s Fractal Leap Toward a Space Elevator The advantages of a space elevator have been percolating through…
Ancient Life on Ceres? We keep going through revolutions in the way science fiction writers handle asteroids. Discovered in 1801,…
Claudio Maccone (1948-2025) In all too many ways, I wasn’t really surprised to learn that Claudio Maccone had passed away….
Generation Ships and their Consequences Our ongoing discussion of the Project Hyperion generation ship contest continues to spark a wide…
Chrysalis: Designing a Generation Ship If you want to explore the history of generation ships in science fiction, you might…
A Rotating Probe Launcher Alternative to TARS Shortly before publishing my article on David Kipping’s TARS concept (Torqued Accelerator using…
ETI in our Datasets? A recent workshop at Ohio State raises a number of interesting questions regarding what is being…
SETI at the Extremes Science fiction has always provoked interesting research. After all, many of the scientists I’ve spoken with…
A Better Look at 3I/ATLAS Just a short note, prompted by the release of new imagery of the intersellar object…
New Model to Prioritize the Search for Exoplanet Life Our recent focus on habitability addresses a significant problem. In order…
A Sedna Orbiter via Nuclear Propulsion When you’re thinking deep space, it’s essential to start planning early, at least at…
Interstellar Flight: Perspectives and Patience This morning’s post grows out of listening to John Coltrane’s album Sun Ship earlier in…
Odd Couple: Gas Giants and Red Dwarfs The assumption that gas giant planets are unlikely around red dwarf stars is…
Inflatable Technologies for Deep Space One idea for deep space probes that resurfaces every few years is the inflatable sail….
Expansion of the Universe: An End to the ‘Hubble Tension’? When one set of data fails to agree with another…
The Statistically Quantitative Information from Null Detections of Living Worlds: Lack of positive detections is not a fruitless search It’s…
Unusual Skies: Optical Pulses & Celestial Bubbles Finding unusual things in the sky should no longer astound us. It’s pretty…
HD 219134: Fine-Tuning Stellar Music HD 219134, an orange K-class star in Cassiopeia, is relatively close to the Sun (21…
Is Planet Nine Alone in the Outer System? It was Robert Browning who said “Ah, but a man’s reach should…
Charting the Interstellar Medium We don’t talk about the interstellar medium as much as we ought to. After all, if…
TOI-270 d: The Clearest Look Yet at a Sub-Neptune Atmosphere Sub-Neptune planets are going to be occupying scientists for a…
New Explanations for the Enigmatic Wow! Signal The Wow! signal, a one-off detection at the Ohio State ‘Big Ear’ observatory…
On ‘Sun-like’ Stars The thought of a planet orbiting a Sun-like star began to obsess me as a boy, when…
A Multiwavelength Look at Proxima Centauri’s Flares The problem of flares in red dwarf planetary systems is stark. With their…
The Ethics of Spreading Life in the Cosmos We keep trying to extend our reach into the heavens, but the…
Deep Space and the Art of the Map NASA’s recently launched SPHEREx space telescope will map the entire celestial sky…
Quantifying the Centauri Stream The timescales we talk about on Centauri Dreams always catch up with me in amusing ways….
Shaping the Sail: Metamaterials and the Manipulation of Light Experimenting on beamed energy and sailcraft is no easy matter, as…
Ernst Öpik and the Interstellar Idea Some names seem to carry a certain magic, at least when we’re young. I…
Pandora: Exoplanet Atmospheres via Smallsat I’ve been digging into NASA’s Small Spacecraft Strategic Plan out of continuing interest in missions…
Pondering Life in an Alien Ocean No one ever said Europa Clipper would be able to detect life beneath the…
Quantifying the Chances of a Technosignature It’s one thing to talk about technology as we humans know it, but applying…
Centauri Dreams to Resume Soon I’d like to thank all of you who wrote comments and emails about the recent…
A Necessary Break It’s time to write a post I’ve been dreading to write for several years now. Some of…
Recalibrating ‘Hot Jupiter’ Migration What catches your eye in this description of an exoplanetary system? Start with a ‘hot Jupiter,’…
A Manhole Cover Beyond the Solar System? Let’s start the year with a look back in time to 1957, a…
An Oddity in the Small Magellanic Cloud Let’s make a quick return to the Magellanics after our recent look at…
Holiday Reprise: Voyager to a Star As I write, Voyager 1 is almost 166 AU from the Sun, moving at…
Charting the Diaspora: Human Migration Outward It’s not often that I highlight the work of anthropologists on Centauri Dreams. But…
Redefining the Galactic Habitable Zone To understand the Solar System’s past and to tighten our parameters for SETI searches, we…
Autumn Among the Galaxy Clusters The idea of moving stars as a way of concentrating mass for use by an…
A Look at Dark Energy & Long-Term Survival If life can organize into sentient beings around stars other than our…
Star Harvest: Civilizations in Search of Energy Living a long time forces decisions that could otherwise be ignored. This is…
Habitability and a Variable Young Sun Given our intense scrutiny of planets around other stars, I find it interesting how…
Vega’s Puzzling Disk Over the weekend I learned about Joseph Haydn’s Symphony No. 47, unusual in that it offers up…
Do You Really Want to Live Forever? Supposing you wanted to live forever and found yourself in 2024, would you…
Streams of Stars and What They Tell Us A quick follow-up to yesterday’s post. The idea of a stream of…
A Gravitational Wave Surprise I think gravitational wave astronomy is one of the most exciting breakthroughs we’re tracking on Centauri…
Planetary Defense: Good News from the Taurids Evidently discovered by French astronomer Pierre Méchain in 1786, Comet Encke was the…
Third Time’s a Charm: A Planet at Barnard’s Star If you follow the fortunes of the stars closest to us,…
Habitability around F-class Stars Some years back I read a science fiction story in which the planet where the action…
Beamed Propulsion and Planetary Security Power beaming to accelerate a ‘lightsail’ has been pondered since the days when Robert Forward…
Green Mars: A Nanotech Beginning I want to return to Mars this morning because an emerging idea on how to…
Pumping Energy into the Solar Wind The solar wind is ever enticing, providing as it does a highly variable stream…
Our Earliest Ancestor Appeared Soon After Earth Formed Until we learn whether or not life exists on other planets, we…
Are Interstellar Quantum Communications Possible? A favorite editor of mine long ago told me never to begin an article with…
The Final Parsec Paradox: When Things Do Not Go Bump in the Night Something interesting is going on in the…
The Search for Things that Matter Overpopulation has spawned so many dystopian futures in science fiction that it would be…
SPECULOOS-3b: A Gem for Atmospheric Investigation “What is this fascination of yours with small red stars?” a friend asked in…
On Astronomical Accidents, and the Proxima Centauri ‘Signal’ that Wasn’t One night a few years back I had a late…
Science Fiction and the Interstellar Imagination “We were dreamers, dreaming greatly, in the man-stifled town; We yearned beyond the sky-line…
