- Kondo, Yoji, Frederick Bruhweiler, John Moore, and Charles Sheffield eds.
Interstellar Travel and Multi-Generation Space Ships.
Burlington, Ontario, Canada: Apogee Books, 2003.
ISBN 1-896522-99-8.
-
This book is a collection of papers presented at a
symposium organised in 2002 by the American Association for the
Advancement of Science. More than half of the content discusses
the motivations, technology, and prospects for interstellar
flight (both robotic probes and “generation ship”
exploration and colonisation missions), while the balance
deals with anthropological, genetic, and linguistic issues
in crew composition for a notional mission with a crew of 200 with
a flight time of two centuries. An essay by Freeman Dyson on “Looking
for Life in Unlikely Places” explores the signatures of
ubiquitous vacuum-adapted life and how surprisingly easy it might
be to detect, even as far as one light-year from Earth.
This volume contains the last published works of Charles Sheffield and
Robert L. Forward, both of whom died in 2002. The papers are all
accessible to the scientifically literate layman and, with one
exception, of high quality. Regrettably, nobody seemed to have
informed the linguist contributor that any interstellar mission would
certainly receive a steady stream of broadband transmissions from the
home planet (who would fund a multi-terabuck mission without the
ability to monitor it and receive the results?), but that chapter is
only four pages and may be deemed comic relief.
June 2007 