Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop

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The Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop (TVIW) is a non-profit educational and space-exploration advocacy organization that facilitates interstellar research and exploration by hosting regular summit meetings, encouraging educational advances, publishing technical and scientific papers, and supporting literature and culture, all in the service of enhancing public attitudes and dialogue toward interstellar exploration.... TVIW assists in building a technological, philosophical, and economic infrastructure that advances the goal of establishing outposts throughout the Solar System and, finally, achieving a pathway to the stars.

TVIW sponsors symposia, awards scholarships, and provides opportunities for researchers to present and publish their work.

History

TVIW arose from collaboration among friends in the Oak Ridge "Friday Night Dinner Club" beginning in 2004, that lead to several proposals and papers about radio astronomy, climate control, and off-world colony development. These friends became Directors of TVIW when the organization incorporated in Tennessee in 2014 and registered as a 501(c)(3) organization.

The first TVIW Board of Directors consisted of John Preston, President; Martha. Knowles, Sect/Treasurer; Ken Roy; David Fields; and Robert Kennedy.  Les Johnson was Advisor.  Current Board Members are E. (Sandy) Montgomery, President; Martha Knowles, Sect/Treasurer; David Fields; Paul Gilster; and Doug Loss.  Advisors are Les Johnson and John D. Rather, who together chair a separate advisory board that has been expanded to include professionals in aerospace, publishing, academia, and the United States military.

Growth

Though the original TVIW concept was explicitly intended to be regional (viz., the American Southeast), it is now, in fact, an internationally recognized event, with major speakers and attendees drawn from the worldwide science and engineering community.  International participation is growing with participation and support of the British Interplanetary Society, the Initiative for Interstellar Studies and the International Space University

Productivity

TVIW Symposia are opportunities for relaxed sharing of ideas in directions that stimulate and encourage Interstellar exploration in areas including propulsion, communications, and research. Five well-attended TVIW Symposia have been held:

Venues and Topical Emphases of TVIW Symposia

Year	Symposium Theme	Venue	Seminars and Public Presentations
2011	'The Start of Something New'	Oak Ridge, TN	ORNL Contributions to NASA programs; ORNL SETI Presentation
2013	‘Let’s Get Started'	Huntsville, AL	James Webb Space Telescope; Atlas and Delta Programs
2014	'Long-Term Thinking–Present-Day Action'	Oak Ridge, TN	'Kepler Mission'; 'Terraforming'; 'Space Propulsion'; 'RSCC SETI Talk'
2016	'From Iron Horse to Worldship: Becoming an Interstellar Civilization'	Chattanooga, TN	'Geoengineering'; 'Conflict in Space'; 'Space Propulsion',‘Homo Stellaris’, ‘Life System Engineering’, ‘Space Solar Power’, and ‘Space Mining’
2017	'Step by Step: Building A Ladder to the Stars'	Huntsville, AL	'LASER Propulsion'; 'Conflict in Space'; 'Humans in Space'

The TVIW 2017 Symposium was presented in partnership with Starship Century and Tau Zero Foundation.

These Symposia, which include seminars, discussion-oriented Sagan Seminars, and public lectures, have been reviewed in some detail in Centauri-Dreams, the news forum of the Tau Zero Foundation. Areas of emphasis have included worldship considerations, the Kepler planetary search, SETI, probable human evolution paths, wormholes and exotic propulsion, long-duration space exploration missions , Breakthrough Starshot, gravitational lensing, and science fiction writing

Presentations have been archived in 63 video recordings on YouTube:The TVIW Channel, on the TVIW Internet site, and in symposium Proceedings. Written versions of these presentations are frequently published in the open literature. For example, some of the 2013 papers were published in the a special proceedings issues if the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society. These include the following examples from the 2013 TVIW Symposium:

• Slow Boat to Centauri: A Millennial Journey Exploiting Resources Along the Way
• Sorry, We Didn’t Mean to Break Your Culture
• Colonizing the Plutoids: The Key to Human Expansion into the Galaxy
• High Temperature Nanocomposites For Nuclear Thermal Propulsion and In-Space Fabrication by Hyperbaric Pressure Laser Chemical Vapor Deposition
• Interstellar Travel without ‘Magic’
• Dyson Dots & Geoengineering: The Killer App Ad Astra

The following examples are taken from the special proceedings issue of the 2014 TVIW Symposium, published in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society:

• Space Radiation and the Brain
• Space 2100: A Shared Visioning Exercise for the Future Space Economy
• Starfleet Deferred: Project Orion in the 1962 Air Force Space Program
• An Interstellar Sail Before 2020?

In association with the symposia, TVIW has presented several graduate and undergraduate scholarships

See also

• British Interplanetary Society
• Icarus Interstellar
• Initiative for Interstellar Studies
• Tau Zero Foundation
• 100 Year Starship

References

This article "Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop" is from Wikipedia. The list of its authors can be seen in its historical and/or the page Edithistory:Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop. Articles copied from Draft Namespace on Wikipedia could be seen on the Draft Namespace of Wikipedia and not main one.

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