Page 252. POSTED ON SEPTEMBER 28, 2011
Off to Orlando
Tomorrow morning, local time (GMT+10) I am boarding a plane for Sydney to connect to a Delta flight to LAX, then Orlando International, Florida. Why, you may ask? Off to the 100 Year Starship Symposium, to present, network and hopefully create the seed organization that will launch a Starship by 2111!
Not all by myself, but as part of the amazing team that is behind “Project Icarus”. Eventually, we hope, we’ll be a (BIG) part of the effort to reach another star system. I am unsure how much Net time I will have while over there, so any updates may have to wait for my return to Oz. See you all then!
Page 251. POSTED ON OCTOBER 1, 2011
Orlando is Awesome!
Too much to tell on the very aggressive schedule here, so a detailed report will need to wait, but I met a FAN! You know who you are. Thanks for the encouragement and I promise more content — I have some actual journal paper ideas gestating and I will need input from my audience, I suspect. One is a paper on Virga-style mega-habitats and Dysonian SETI, to use a new idea from Milan Cirkovic. The other looks at exoplanets and Earth-like versus the astrobiology term of “habitable” — the two are not the same and the consequences are sobering. The recent paper by Traub (go look on the arXiv) which estimates 1/3 of FGK stars has a terrestrial planet in the habitable zone does NOT mean there’s Earths everywhere. What it does mean and how HZ can be improved as a concept is what I want to discuss.
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More later. I have my talk to review and get straight in my head — no hand notes, though I have practiced it — plus I want something helpful to say to Gerald Nordley, mass-beam Guru, on the paper he graciously added me as a co-author. Also I will summarize my talk and direct interested readers to the new web-site from John Hunt, MD, on the interstellar ESCAPE plan.
Page 250. POSTED ON OCTOBER 8, 2011
Post 100 YSS… First, Fast Thoughts
As a fan I can tell you it was an SF-Fan’s dream come true to meet, in the flesh, so many SF-writers and so many Icarii, as well as the Heart & Mind of the TZF. People I met, for the first time, but have corresponded with for a while…
(1) Paul Gilster & Marc Millis, the guys who set the train in motion some years ago
(2) The Icarus Interstellar Board
(3) wide Team Icarus
(4) The Benford Twins
(5) my co-author, Gerald Nordley, and perhaps the best ultra-hard SF writer I know.
(6) Athena Andreadis, molecular biologist and SF thinker
(7) John Cramer, author of “Analog’s” ‘The Alternate View’ and physicist
(8) Jack Sarfatti, the Showman of Speculative Physics
Others I met/heard who maybe aren’t so well-known, but may prove influential in times to come. Such as Young K. Bae, laser propulsion research and inventor of the Photonic Thruster (a very clever multi-bounce photon-propulsion system.) Mark Edwards, of Green Independence, who might have a way of feeding Starship Crews and the whole of Starship Earth.
Fast thoughts — David Nyeland gave a us BIG hint on how to launch a Starship in 100 years… reach out to EVERYONE.
