Is interstellar space travel possible
This is not a title for the kind of article you would find in a traditional encyclopedia but i think large questions of this kind would make interesting articles, keeping in mind to maintain
NeutralPointOfView and to make it work with the structure of other articles. So, on with the article.
- Why not put it on interstellar space travel?
It is probably worth having a seperate page for treatments of this subject in /fiction. With a few rare, honourable exceptions, fictional treatments of this subject make no attempt to coincide with reality. If you are interested in real world issues on this question, you can safely ignore Star Trek and almost every Hollywood movie about space.
Some random headers for paragraphs i will write later if no-one does it first.
other stars are a very long way away
special relativity and the speed of light as a limit
possibility of new physics allowing faster than light travel
possibility of reaching other stars by travelling slower than light
A couple of thoughts on the topic:
There's a comment, (possibly by the english physiologist J.B.S. Haldane) that might be worth tracking down, that interstellar travel is more a problem in biology than technology: ie. the problem is our short lifespans compared with the travel times...I think it was Haldane (or possibly Olaf Stapledon) who came up with the idea of multigeneration 'arks' for interstellar travel.