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Comment by the_af | Hacker News Reader

Any idea who this Paul Gilster is? Or Tau Zero? He says he was trained as a medievalist who later turned into flight instructor and now he's obviously fascinated with astronomy and exoplanets.

I'm always wary of sites like this, but this one seems to have a long history, starting in 2004, and as far as I can tell the articles are solid (or at least, not quackery). This article in particular seems reasonable, too.

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Apparently Tau Zero was created after a government program to investigate interstellar travel propulsion methods concluded, and the program manager wanted to keep it going, and it's a group of people who want to visit other stars:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_Propulsion_Physic...

> it's a group of people who want to visit other stars

And I want a pet unicorn. And a male contraceptive pill.

Only one of those things is ever going to happen.

> I'm always wary of sites like this

I can't really think of much that is more legit than a special purpose blog distilling current research papers into long form blog posts, except perhaps the research papers themselves?

As long as they stay that way.

For every site doing that, there are 10 sites pretending to do that, with various levels of quackery.

It makes sense to be wary at first.

I feel like quackery and clickbait give strong vibes which can be detected immediately. This has the feel of an educated and deeply interested hobbyist or some astronomer's side project.

Agreed that it has the right vibes.

But it always pay to be a little wary, which is why I made my comment.

> I can't really think of much that is more legit than a special purpose blog distilling current research papers into long form blog posts, except perhaps the research papers themselves?

If that's what they are doing. But it's hard to tell without looking carefully and sifting through more than a couple of articles.

Like I said, it seems legit.

Tau Zero is the title of an SF book by Poul Anderson in which humans make an STL interstellar voyage. They probably got inspired from that book.

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