I saw this another thread (kudos to mike_bike_kite for posting it!) and it reminded me of a couple questions I've been thinking about for a while.
Quote:
Originally Posted by mike_bike_kite
I was just reading Time for the Stars by Robert A. Heinlein (1956). The crew on the space ship are out in deep space and needing to either grow or recycle everything to survive. It made me smile to be reading a SciFi story on electronic paper about the crew of some future space craft who were having to recycle paper for their morning newspaper  |
Many sci-fi authors like Heinlein have assumed that faster-than-light travel and/or extrasolar exploration would become possible in the future, and that humanity will colonize worlds beyond the solar system. They've been wrong on that prediction so far, of course, but will they eventually be proven right? I wouldn't bet on it. Based on our current understanding of physics, faster-than-light travel is extremely impractical and it's unlikely it will
ever become possible, simply because the energy required to warp space time would be too great.
Never being able to leave the solar system doesn't mean we won't find life on other planets. I imagine we'll discover life elsewhere in the near future by using spectroscopy; if we find an extrasolar planet that has oxygen in its atmosphere, for example, we can infer there's probably life there, since oxygen gas is fairly reactive and generally combines with other elements, so its persistence in Earth's atmosphere, for example, is due to photosynthesis. But even once we do find a planet outside the solar system that does have life we'll never be able to meet E.T.; neither s/he nor us will be able to cross the vast oceans of interstellar space. The reality is that we're stuck here on our own little island and can't go anywhere else.
Given that humankind will probably never be able to go far beyond the bounds of our solar system - that what we've got now is what all we'll ever have - does that knowledge change our priorities for scientific research?
Should it change our priorities? And should science fiction be written to reflect the reality, rather than indulging in a fantasy (extrasolar exploration) that will probably never happen? Anyway, just questions brought to mind by the Heinlein story, not that they're directly related, but rather more of a tangent, I suppose.