Alastair Reynolds, echoing Ian McDonald, writes that "SF might be on the verge of exhibiting a collective loss of faith in the old dream of space travel beyond our solar system." And that may well be so, but in very real senses the dream lives on: witness the launch of India's first mission to the moon this week, the sixth such national attempt in world history. (via SF Signal)

Via the MetaFilter thread on that Nick Bostrom article hoping there's no sign of alien life I blogged a few days ago comes an article by Charlie Stross on interstellar distances and the obscene costs that would be involved in traveling anywhere off-world.

When we look at the rest of the solar system, the picture is even bleaker. Mars is ... well, the phrase "tourist resort" springs to mind, and is promptly filed in the same corner as "Gobi desert". As Bruce Sterling has puts it: "I'll believe in people settling Mars at about the same time I see people settling the Gobi Desert. The Gobi Desert is about a thousand times as hospitable as Mars and five hundred times cheaper and easier to reach. Nobody ever writes "Gobi Desert Opera" because, well, it's just kind of plonkingly obvious that there's no good reason to go there and live. It's ugly, it's inhospitable and there's no way to make it pay. Mars is just the same, really. We just romanticize it because it's so hard to reach." In other words, going there to explore is fine and dandy — our robots are all over it already. But as a desirable residential neighbourhood it has some shortcomings, starting with the slight lack of breathable air and the sub-Antarctic nighttime temperatures and the Mach 0.5 dust storms, and working down from there.

Quick hits:

* 'To shoot a man because you disagree with him about Hegel's dialectic is after all to honour the human spirit.' —George Steiner

* Via Posthuman Blues, Centauri Dreams looks at Stephen Hawking's recent speech on space exploration and 'the long result.'

"We cannot envision visiting [Earth-like planets around other stars] with current technology, but we should make interstellar travel a long-term aim," he said. "By long term, I mean over the next 200 to 500 years."

* Attention universe: please stop making me sort of respect Jenna Bush.

A dream deep inside me, long thought dead, reawakens: Alpha Centauri may have an Earth-like planet in the habitable zone. Via Monkeyfilter.