Space Travel for Beginners
the final frontier...
Somewhere in the Jetson bubble-topped future all books will be full whistles-and-bells interactive hypertext objects able to take you to source material at the move of a cursor and a tap from an opposable thumb. In these last Gutenberg days, however, we still have footnotes and addenda on printed paper. This page is the start of a gradually expanding list of whack-it-and-see further reference points to the contents of Space Travel for Beginners. It begins with some fairly obvious homepages and news sites and, like the book itself, starts to get weirder the further out you go…
NASA
The home of the USA’s National Aeronautics and Space Administration, admin for the various Moon missions and today’s Shuttle programme, the folks who put the Hubble telescope into orbit and are doing the same with the Herschel infrared telescope and the imminent James Webb telescope, which, like the Hubble, has its own website, below. You can also - as is the case with many of these websites - subscribe to their newsletter for updates.
Hubble Telescope
The technology, the downloads, the t-shirts and a vast collection of fantastic images of billion-years-old starlight…
James Webb telescope
As the Hubble approaches retirement, the next optical wonder will launch in 2014 to take its place, with a twenty-one foot mirror and a sun canopy the size of a tennis court.
Mount Palomar
Some grown men grow misty-eyed at the sight of a domed mountaintop observatory illuminated at twilight (but, hey, it’s nowhere near as saddo as looking for the meaning of life on the back of a Bob Dylan album sleeve…), and the Palomar remains the most iconic observatory in the world.
SETI
This is the official site for the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, and not to be confused with its young pup below…
SETI @ Home
Which is where you and your computer can sign up to help find out if she is out there, waiting for the right moment to introduce herself, or just giving us a very wide berth.
Seth Shostak’s confessions
SETI’s Senior Astronomer Seth Shostak has yet to launch his own .com website, but has a staff page at the home of SETI and a regular online radio show, Are We Alone?, which addresses what we might call ETology and related technological matters. He also has a new book that was published too late to be included in STfB, Confessions of an Alien Hunter, which continues the adventures of the Earthling most entitled to staff the welcome carpet for Captain Beefheart’s bug-eyed beans from Venus when they arrive. The book is available at Amazon, and you can click the blue url to teleport to his latest broadcast...
Arecibo National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center, Puerto Rico
And this is where she would probably make first contact, the radio telescope made famous in GoldenEye, the National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center, o, en Español, el Centro Nacional de Astronomía e Ionosfera (NAIC), partly buried in the jungles of Puerto Rico. No Gift Shop yet but a Help Wanted department that just might have a job up your street. How cool would that be? I’d [have to] take a janitor’s job to hang around such groovy hardware, and in the middle of a jungle, too...
Invitation to ETI
The site backed by some one hundred scientists who have approved this message to ET, should she be listening in - or, at least, reading English with Times Roman installed in her fonts. ETI has also produced an allegedly parodic pop song, ‘Welcome ETI’, to the tune of ‘Scarlet Ribbons’. Proof, if we still needed it, that astronomers make lousy DJs.
METI@home
The pro-contact group hosted by the Kotel’nikov Institute of Radio Engineering and Electronics under the aegis of the Russian Academy of Sciences, explaining the movement for ‘active’ messaging to aliens, as opposed to SETI’s ‘passive’ search for contact.
The Lifeboat Foundation/Shouting at the Cosmos
Countering what it believes to be irresponsible spamming across the universe is only one of the many projects of this NGO founded to promote debate about the ‘existential risks’ of increasingly powerful technologies such as genetic engineering, nanotechnology and robotics/AI ‘as we move towards the Singularity’. None of these, however, quite has the ‘Watch the skies! They’re coming!’ thrill of scientist and SF author Dr. David Brin’s very serious polemic against frivolous flyposting campaigns among the stars. Interestingly, he also has our friend Jared Diamond on his side...
SETI League
Got a radio telescope going idle? The SETI League wants you to join its intergalactic telephone tree. The League will also sell you a t-shirt declaring your belief in ET, and is connected to an amusing array of even wackier websites.
The Royal Observatory, Greenwich
The Observatory has undergone a refit since I last visited, with the opening of the futuristic Peter Harrison Planetarium. It has improved public access to the historic observatories, and the winter night-time viewings are listed each autumn. Wrap up warm (we took a discreet hip flask...).
Sydney Observatory
Short of going the very complicated route to the European Southern Observatory’s spectacular La Silla and Paranal sites up in Chile’s snowy Atacama Desert (but click here if you fancy trying) the observatory overlooking Sydney Harbour is probably the best place to explore the southern sky. Then again...
ESO Gallery
The European Southern Observatory’s photo gallery has possibly the most extraordinary collection of images from the cosmos, as well as the Observatory’s own Earth-based hardware. Scroll down the ‘Picture of the Week’ page for a fantastic 360-degree panorama of the southern skies over the Atacama Desert...
Meteor Showers Online
A fine website maintained by veteran fireball hunter Gary W. Kronk - whose efforts on behalf of the science earned him a minor planet named after him - with details and calendar of all the major and minor meteor showers through the year.
CERN/Large Hadron Collider
No cyber souvenir stall as yet, but the public sector of the site for the Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire offers exhaustive background on the work of CERN. It also has a Help Wanted page for anyone with a CV that would get past the Human Resources department, plus a droll kids’ play area with the very theme-parky name of CERNland.
The Planetary Society
Founded in 1980 by the late Carl Sagan and others, the Society’s mission is ‘To inspire the people of Earth to explore other worlds, understand our own, and seek life elsewhere’ - but its otherwise sober website is not above including the tell-tale ‘shop online’ button for compulsive purchasers of embarrassing leisurewear.
A Brief History of Time
Stephen Hawking’s book has to be one of the least-read bestsellers of all time (although he does at least join the likes of Proust, Joyce, Pynchon and others in the pantheon of great unread books), but this is the site dedicated to the man who achieved the remarkable feat of planting quantum physics on the shelves of WH Smith and Wal-Mart.
A homepage at the end of the Milky Way
Journalist and author Timothy Ferris, onetime Rolling Stone editor and nowadays better known as the author of Coming of Age in the Milky Way and several other excellent related titles, is without doubt the best popular explainer of the cosmos in print. Whereas
Italo Calvino
would probably have preferred to fox you with his elegant, Zen-minimal allegories in Mr Palomar, Cosmicomics and others. This playful site is an excellent intro to his work and a delight in store for anyone who knows his work already.
Long Now Foundation
Possibly the coolest t-shirts likely to be found by readers of STfB are just some of the goodies to be snaffled at the merch page for the Long Now Foundation. Before exiting through the gift shop, you can also explore the philosophy and projects promoted by the Foundation. Not least -
Longplayer
Composer and former Pogues member Jem Finer’s thousand-year-long composition Longplayer can be heard, and purchased in sampled form as a CD, via this site dedicated to the longest piece of music in the history of humanity. Finer also has a frequently hilarious home site, which includes information about his minimalist land art project, Score for a Hole in the Ground, plus two astronomy-related projects, including a video of Finer and collaborator Ansuman Biswas performing in zero gravity aboard a Russian airforce vomit comet. And then there’s
Brian Eno
While this site is maintained by a fan or fans, as the man himself is disinclined to run one himself, it is the first port of call for information and links about the composer. He isn’t above taking your money, however; add the word ‘shop’ to any Google search for his name and you’ll land on a site where you can give him money and in return he will give you CDs, t-shirts and more.
James Turrell/Roden Crater
Despite an ever-expanding portfolio of monumental works, light/landscape sculptor Turrell has yet to succumb to the appeal of having www. in front of his name. This is probably the most comprehensive web representation of his work currently available. And since we’re here...
Paul Schütze
http://www.paulschutze.com/
Turrell’s musical collaborator on the Roden Crater project has a suitably austere minimalist website devoted to his quarter-century-long career as a composer at the vanguard of electronic music. Schütze is also undertaking a gradual programme of releasing his works as free downloads at the site.
Space is the Place
Cleo’s spectral composer-in-residence Sun Ra died in 1993, before the boom in music websites even began, so it’s not surprising that there is no site dedicated to his life and work. This is the best place to start to explore the crazy genius that was Herman ‘Sonny’ Blount.
Songs of hydrogen (I)
You’ll find very little about la canción del hidrógeno in cyberspace, and certainly nothing specific about it here, but the website of Dusseldorf’s shy and retiring Kraftwerk might sound a distant tone. I went out dancing with them once, and can reveal that they dance to their own records in nightclubs...
Songs of hydrogen (II)
Robert Wilson is the man who put the spaceship into ‘Spaceship’ in Einstein on the Beach, and put Robert E. Lee behind the porthole of another in the CIVIL warS (his choice of cases there, by the way). He is also responsible for some of the most mind-expanding theatre works of the past half century. If I were to ask to identify the person I most suspect of being an alien living here camouflaged as an Earthling, it would be Robert Woodrow Wilson, who at the very least found Earthling hosts with a sense of humour when it came to naming their alien foundling.
EarthSky
This website presenting ‘A Clear Voice for Science’ - engagingly subtitled, ‘The World’s Top Scientists Heard 15 Million Times a Day’, which would surely count as galactic noise pollution in the eyes of The Lifeboat Foundation – is an encyclopaedic site addressing the ethics of science on issues such as water, energy, health, agriculture, environment, biodiversity, space and human impact on the planet. It is probably not its raison d’etre, but it also has a rolling ‘Featured Scientist’ photo sidebar presenting a beauty pageant of egghead pin-ups. Prof. B. Quatermass has yet to turn up on this particular catwalk.
The Universes of Max Tegmark
MIT brainiac Tegmark is possibly the most far-out theoretical physicist at large on the internet, an author and presenter of numerous documentaries from the frontier of weird science, not averse to tackling conundrums such as quantum suicide, and someone who probably considers multiverse theory a light mid-morning snack. Pause after the ‘mit’ if typing his url into your search engine and it will swamp you with other boggling topics currently being wrestled into submission at MIT.
Carl Sagan Portal
Part shrine, part ideas hub, this is dedicated to the life, work and influence of the late great popularizer of spacethink.
Noches de cocaina, y mas...
The late ironist and dystopian James Graham Ballard has at least two sites dedicated to his work: the first, JG Ballard.com, the official website, the second, Ballardian, run by Australian author, academic and cultural theorist Simon Sellars, a veritable Aladdin’s Cave of Ballardiana with contributions from the worlds of literature, politics, art, music, post-modern theory and guerrilla cultural activism. Not a site to recommend to a maiden aunt who thought Empire of the Sun an interesting war movie.