From Paul Bowden
In her contribution to the Deep Future special, Anne-Marie Corley explores potential space exploration, writing: “Our descendants may well have to come to terms with never having the means or lifespan to reach other stars” (3 March, p 45).
The means is one thing, but the lifespan is another. Accelerating (and decelerating) at just 1g – emulating Earth’s gravity – would allow a human to get a fair way across our galaxy during their lifetime, because relativistic time dilation means that time on-ship is not the same as on Earth. If I had the right spaceship, I could travel to our neighbouring star Proxima Centauri and back. Of course, a much longer time will have elapsed on Earth, but that’s beside the point.
From Denis Watkins
With “God, gold or glory” as motivation for the exploration of the world by Europeans from the 17th century onwards, and in view of our culpability for the wholesale extinction of species that is allied to the plundering of the Earth, perhaps the quarantine of humans to the solar system is for the best.
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