Note from the Editor:
This article was kindly written for the SDC by member @Doctor Alan.

I think I was interested in space travel from way back, probably as a result of our parents getting us the excellent comic Eagle with our hero Dan Dare, who would get into all sorts of scrapes with alien species accompanied by his off-sider Digby. The comic wasn’t just a load of silly pictures; it was actually educational – I can’t think of anything similar today. I also read books. A good example was The Authentic Book of Space, with a foreword by Arthur C Clarke, where our 1950s knowledge of other planets was displayed to whet our scientific appetites. Of course, we’ve been able to find out a lot more since that book was written.



What is Interstellar travel?
Most of us have heard of Star Trek and have probably seen the movies, too. Without exception, the problem of the incredible distances involved in travelling to any other star is simply ‘brushed away’ by talking of ‘Warp Drive’, where ‘Warp 1’ is the speed of light and 'Warp 7’ would be seven times the speed of light. Our closest star is Proxima Centauri, and it is about 4.3 light-years away. Because our technology has only allowed us to travel at a tiny fraction of the speed of light, it would take many generations to travel there. Just a reminder: it takes light from our Sun about 8 minutes to travel to Earth, and from Mars, the average time for voice communication (which travels at the speed of light) is anywhere between about 4 minutes to 20 minutes, depending upon the relative positions of both planets.



Why would we travel to the stars?
President Kennedy spoke about the reason for travelling to the Moon – ‘not because it’s easy, but because it’s hard!’ Advances in the technical world have always relied on human beings ‘not giving up’ on ideas concerning problems that seem insurmountable.

Like squabbling children, the human race is more inclined to fight over supposed ‘territory’ than to realise the planet has only a finite amount of energy contained in resources and that we all need to work together to plan for the future. These resources are going to run out in the not-too-distant future, and we’ll need somewhere else to live. (Perhaps by then, we’ll have ‘grown up’ a little!) One could argue that it’s not a great idea to inflict our ‘human disease’ on the rest of the Universe – better to keep it all in one place. But I have rather a (probably naive) romantic idea that we could actually create a Utopian society where we could all ‘Live as One’. (In the words of John Lennon, but certainly not confined to him alone).



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