The final frontier

As the world -- or at least the corporate media -- seems enthralled by the spectacle of billionaires taking joy rides to the edge of space, I feel compelled to comment on the larger implications. There are no larger implications, other than the prospect that billionaires may continue to take joyrides to the edge of space until they get tired of it, then they ' ll find some other way to waste their ill-gotten gains. This may seem a digression, but bear with me. Many people find it so compellingly obvious that we ought to have discovered other technological civilizations in the galaxy, and even be in contact with them, that they actually call the absence of detectable extraterrestrial civilizations a " paradox. "  That is ridiculous. Would we be detectable to ET? Our feeble radio broadcasts are undetectable a couple of light years away, and since the nearest star is more than 4 light years away, that means nobody but Homo sapiens is watching I Love Lucy reruns.Sadly, Einstein was right. It is impossible to travel faster than light. Physicists have had more than a century to chew over relativity and this conclusion is absolutely airtight. Star Wars, Star Trek, the C.J. Cherryh universe, Asimov ' s Foundation, Dune, the Hyperion Tetralogy, Buck Rogers -- all that is impossible. Actually, it ' s practically impossible to travel at even a substantial fraction of the speed of light. If you ' re going at 20% light speed and hit a grain of sand, it will be like an atomic bom...
Source: Stayin' Alive - Category: American Health Source Type: blogs