Newsletter

The Board of Directors of i4is and the Editor of Principium will make the following announcement in the next issue of Principium:”The i4is Board has been considering the future of Principium, given changes in the ways in which people receive and consume information and content. We have decided to pause the publication of Principium with […]

Dami Lee on Project HyperionWe were really happy to see that our Project Hyperion competition (https://www.projecthyperion.org/) captured the imagination of the architect and Youtuber Dami Lee, who posted a detailed and thoughtful video commentary ‘Can Humans REALLY Leave Earth?’ Over one million views! Check it out: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BBb2gC0lByk&pp=0gcJCVACo7VqN5tD(You may want to skip the ads that are […]

News from i4isThe i4is Educational team are currently recruiting! If any of our members are interested, and especially if you are in striking distance of London or Lincoln, both in the UK, we could do with support at the April events mentioned below. You can read about some of the activities in recent issues of […]

News from i4is The next meeting of the i4is SF Book Club is Thursday, 19th March 2026 at 1900 UK time (online)  A keen group of i4is members – writers and readers of SF meet monthly online for about one hour to discuss various SF stories, currently short stories taken from ‘The Road to Science […]

Catching 3I/ATLAS Using a Solar OberthThree of our regular contributors Adam Hibberd (i4is, London), T. Marshall Eubanks (Space Initiatives Inc, USA) and Andreas Hein (i4is Exec Director and University of Luxembourg) have co-authored this 3I/ATLAS paper, https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.02533. The third interstellar object to be discovered, 3I/ATLAS, has a unique and continually unfolding story to tell of […]

Intercepting Interstellar Objects A recent paper by Colin Snodgrass (University of Edinburgh, UK) et al (https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.00492) describes how the ESA Comet Interceptor mission, which is due to launch in 2028/29 to a yet-to-be-discovered target, can provide a conceptual basis for a future mission to visit an Interstellar Object. Comet Interceptor will wait in space until […]

News from i4isThe AGM of the Initiative for Interstellar Studies will be held virtually at 14:00 GMT on Saturday 13th December 2025 via Zoom, followed by a virtual social event. Please email andreas.hein@i4is.org if you wish to attend. Estimating The Number of Intelligent Extraterrestrial CivilizationsHristo Delev (MPHAC “Uni Hospital”, Bulgaria) and Todorka L. Dimitrova (University […]

News from i4is The next meeting of the i4is SF Book Club is Thursday, November 20th at 1900 UK time (via Zoom), if you would like to join in send a request through to bookclub@i4is.org.   The reading material this month will be 2 short stories from “The Road to Science Fiction Volume 4 – From […]

Origins of Life: The Possible and the ActualIn Origins of Life: The Possible and the Actual (https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/202508.1593/v1) researchers from Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona (Ricard Sole), Santa Fe Institute USA (Chris Kempes) and University of York, UK (Susan Stepney) consider questions of how life forms, whether life is an inevitable outcome, and how diverse its presentation […]

News from i4isOur US colleagues, led by Robert Kennedy, are now working with partners on another NASA NIAC Phase 2 study on betavoltaics as in our 2023 paper, Swarming Proxima Centauri: Optical Communication Over Interstellar Distances (https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.07061). And members may have noticed some fuss around the third known interstellar object, 3I/Atlas, which has included much input from our […]

Preprints from Principium 50, August 2025Members can access preprints of articles to be published in Principium issue 50 August 2025. Please report any errors or omissions to the Editor at – john.davies@i4is.orgThe preprints are –· International Astronautical Congress – IAC25 – Sydney 29 September – 3 October -Announced Interstellar PresentationsWhether you are attending this year’s […]

I4is Workshops at the Royal Institution London 7/8th AugustThe i4is education team will be once again bringing the Skateboards to Starships workshops to the Royal Institution in August. For those not familiar we show how the physics and maths of jumping off a skateboard can be used to understand how rockets work and how different […]