Centauri Dreams

Published where on the internet? If it had a given domain name then you need to manage that. If it's on a specific site, then you need to know that it's there.

For 10 years it's easy - pay a few dozen people to make sure it happens. 100 years is harder, but doable with the same fashion. For a movie example, consider the Western Union message that Doc Brown sent in 1885 to Marty McFly in 1955, in Back to the Future II. Brown had the advantage of knowing that Western Union would exist, but I can imagine similar systems working.

After all, there are long-running experiments which take more than a lifetime, like Beal's germination experiment which started in 1879 and is expected to end in 2100. With enough money you can set up a fund, with a requirement that the information be published at set times in the future.

For 1,000 years? Forget about it. There are few human systems which have worked for that long, and your best bet is to write a document that's interesting enough so as to inspire someone in the future to transmit that document for you. For example, read http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/97nov/teller.htm and see how someone in 1916 convinced someone in 1997 to do something.

For an entertaining fable, read http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=11894 regarding a tale of New College, Oxford needing new oak beams.

A very different mode of Statite system operation is possible that would allow the Statite to be placed at any point around the Earth, at all times of the year, even over the sunlit side, at the expense of slightly greater operating distance. Instead of the Statite being balanced by sunlight in the gravitational field of the Earth, the Statite would be placed in orbit around the Sun, at such a distance from the earth that the gravitational field of the Earth plus the moon is only a perturbation on the gravitational field of the Sun. [1]

But in practice, I think you're right. Forward wrote a short story about such a "pole sitter" ("Race to the Pole"), and had one of the characters say this:

The control problem of keeping the [statite] balanced over the pole is very tricky, especially during the summer season of that hemisphere when the polar axis is over on the sunlit side of the Earth. That’s why ‘pole-sitters’ have to be placed so far away from the Earth. If they get any closer than 250 Earth radii, they become unstable during the summer. [2]

[1] https://patents.google.com/patent/US5183225A/en

[2] https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2010/07/29/statites-hovering-over-the-pole/

https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2020/12/10/developing-focal-mission-concepts/ (and its critical analysis) https://arxiv.org/pdf/1604.06351

I believe that work on such a project would be interesting, even if it isn't ever done. It is something that if you worked on it as a grad student, and then became a professor and your grad students worked on it ... and they became professors and their grad students worked on it - they'd be the ones seeing the results.

Not so much a "this is a way to do things..." but rather a "thinking about research that spans generations and the problems that they solve in the process of doing that great project has useful spinoffs."

A mission out to 550 AU at New Horizons speed of 2.9 AU / year (it still boggles the mind of talking about those speeds and distances) is nearly 200 years from launch to primary science objective.

It's "only" been 45 years since Mariner 2 to New Horizons.

There's also solar electric propulsion, which when combined with water as propellant, leads to dramatic (10-100x) cost reductions due to increased propellant efficiency plus the synergies created by using water as reaction mass (it can be used for everything from radiation shielding to crew consumables prior to being sent to the engines, which effectively turns most of your consumables mass into propellant).

This approach also benefits from ongoing improvements in component technologies (thin film PV, electric propulsion, and inflatable structures), so a reusable spacecraft based on this design pattern could be upgraded as things improve.

(Release early, release often, versus the 30 year Gantt chart methodology favored by space agencies).

http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=33078

I submitted a site as a joke and now I feel bad because there are a lots of interesting sites submitted.

So let me contribute with 2 other sites, maybe not the "coolest" but I think they will be of interest to some fraction of the people here (for those who dont know them)

- http://www.astronautix.com/ A labor of love of just 1 person, almost of 80000 pages! on humanity space programs,you can spend hours and hours reading about obscure soviet prototypes, NASA suits, the Chinese space probes, etc

- https://www.centauri-dreams.org/ A very active (and long) blog about interstellar travel. Despite the fact the subject is now more fiction than science the articles discussed and reviewed are about actual science done by actual scientists (many good guest posts too)

heh, as you say; apparently there was a previous signal; reading the article about the find at centauri dreams, http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=36210 - and it does mention a pre-2016 Doppler signal with a period of 11.2 days around specifically Proxima, that was unconfirmed, and that this mission was to investigate that more closely. "The HARPS Pale Red Dot campaign was created to confirm or refute this 11.2-day signal"

I'm just not sure if that's what the speaker in your video was talking about, of if the embarrasing mistake that was actually announced was the Alpha Centauri Bb planet (or maybe there were other candidates I didn't hear about); I'm gonna watch the lecture you linked and see. Thx for an interesting link, btw!