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Friday, 31 December 2010

Interstellar future past

Centauri Dreams looks back at Leslie Shepherd’s "Interstellar Flight," which appeared in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society  (1952).   It's an interesting bit of retrospective on an early, serious look at interstellar flight, though he actually means to be reassuring when he compares the crew of a generation ship to Kamikaze pilots.  Somehow I think that people who dream of such things spend more time on the engineering than on the morality of their plans.

Actually, the engineering doesn't bear very close looking into either.  A few years ago, Charles Stross crunched the numbers and concluded that getting to Fairyland is a more practical goal.
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1 comment:

  1. jayessellFriday, 31 December 2010 at 17:42:00 GMT-8

    One solution is to have unmanned ships with the passengers stored as frozen embryos.

    I hope kids raised by robots turn out ok.

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