Chapter 7 - Overcoming Division

Summary

Our world is ending, and humans are bored. Sat in their offices, their desire has withered away. To forget their depression, they become frenzied consumers, but this comforts them less and less. A time will come when they will throw themselves into a rage, hammer on the walls, strike down others in their fury, go crazy and dream of revolution, the apocalypse and the Great Recommencement. Salvation may lie in our departure, but leaving Earth is easier said than done. When reading such a sinister description of our future, one may wonder if there is any hope at all. The answer is yes, there is, although huge obstacles stand in the way of our expansion into space.

Optimists could argue that technological progress has accelerated so much in the recent past that we should not worry too much about our ability to reach for another star. They could also say that we went to the moon in 1969 with technology that was far inferior to mobile phones we were using in 2010 and that mobile phones themselves did not even exist when we sent Voyager I to space in 1977. Based on this trajectory, space travel would get cheaper and cheaper and increasingly efficient.

I do not fully agree with that argument, for three reasons. First, I believe that interstellar travel confronts us with a technological gap that has nothing in common even with the one that separates the wheel from nuclear propulsion. Moving at the same speed as Voyager I (at around 60,000 km per hour, 17 km per second or 0.005 percent of light speed), reputed to be the fastest machine ever created by man, and the first to have reached interstellar space, it would take 75,000 years to reach Proxima Centauri, the closest star to our solar system, located 4.24 light-years from Earth. If we were to attain 10 percent of light speed, we could in theory hope to reach this coveted star in 42 years, from a terrestrial viewpoint, which would make it a one-way trip. To bring a person alive to a point situated light-years away from our planet and return will require to master sources of energies that are unknown to us today, and this will imply a gigantic technological leap forward.