From Ian Napier, Adelaide, South Australia
Chris Mason suggests that within a billion years we will have to leave Earth to escape the effects of a dying sun (17 July, p 44). We will need to colonise a new planet using a spacecraft capable of supporting successive generations for the voyage.
I suggest a postscript, in which the generation ship, nearing New Earth after a couple of thousand years of travel, sends a triumphant message back home to that effect.
Almost instantly it receives a message that says: “Welcome to New Earth folks. We didn’t know who you were until our historians dug down and realised that you came from our home planet a while back. We got here well over a thousand years before you because, a few centuries after you left, a way was found to travel at near light speed.”
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