Re: Interstellar exploration - do we have the technology today?

Paul Schlyter wrote:
But that assumes you are actually onboard the spacecraft and you don't expect to return home to your family...

That too was the fate of many early explorers in the past. Consider for
instance all the immigrants to North America - most of them never returned
to their homelands in Europe. However, they did often bring their families
along. And the eventual first interstellar exploreres could do the same
thing: bring their family with them. After all, if the ship cannot reach a
high enough fraction of the speed of light, then the travel time as perceived
by the people onboard the ship will exceed a human lifetime - and the only
ones who can hope to reach the destination is the offspring of those who once
started the journey.

No, this is not an ordinary business trip where you "return home to your
family" afterwards. It's a dedication for the rest of your life, and
probably for the life of your kids and grandkids, etc, too.

Yes, that's exactly my thinking. This small world we currently live in where everything is reachable in short timescales and communication is more or less instantaneous is perhaps just a momentary aberration in history. Good science fiction is really about commentary on the world we live in today, but from a more distant perspective. So it makes sense that so much popular science fiction (like Star Trek) would focus on a future modeled on today's world only bigger.

The future I foresee has nomadic humans spreading out into the galaxy the same way we spread out from Africa.

Greg

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Greg Crinklaw
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