Since time immemorial, humans have gazed into the night sky and found reason for awe and hope. The grandeur of space has always made life on Earth feel fragile, even petty. Does it matter that Lover of Pigs has hoarded half of the tribal harvest and didn’t declare his inheritance of three goats? Will cutting down all the trees for firewood bring on devastating climate change? Can the elders be trusted with the apparatus of village-gossip collection? None of it seems very important when the night sky is glittering overhead.

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The stars have shaped our thinking – from the earliest religions to the latest bestselling sci-fi novel. Stephen Hawking’s plan to laser propel tiny spacecraft towards Alpha Centauri doesn’t only sound like sci-fi, it is an idea straight from the pages of David Brin’s Existence, among others. Despite Hawking’s longstanding worries that any contact with aliens might not turn out well for humanity, the lasers used will be visible across the entire universe. Hopefully they’ll attract the attention of some advanced civilisation. Or at the very least, somebody more friendly than the Vogons from Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, ready to bring down their municipal boot heel on weaker species.

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As long as we avoid getting squished, the temptation to follow our robot micro-armada with something more substantial will be impossible to resist. The generation starship – on which subsequent generations of explorers live and die during the centuries or millennia it would take to cross the vast reaches of intergalactic space at any sub-light speed – has been my favourite speculative form of space travel since listening to Earthsearch on Radio 4 as a kid.

Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora is a generation starship novel that owns the entire genre it grew from. In fact, while Robinson charts two centuries in the life of such a craft, he’s almost arguing for the impossibility of the whole idea. Here on Earth, there are 35 entire phyla of bacterial life that we’ve only just discovered. We barely understand the biology of our planet well enough not to destroy it here, let alone successfully ship it elsewhere.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The superluminal (faster than light) USS Starship Enterprise, from Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979). Photograph: Ronald Grant

And the psychology of the human species is so poorly understood that the idea that we might survive for generations together in a big tin can is simply insane. Aurora digs into many of the social and psychological issues of generation ships, but ultimately Robinson is an optimist; a believer in the powers of the rational, scientific mind to overcome all challenges. Meanwhile, the science-fiction writing community can’t even organise the Hugo awards without descending into factionalism worthy of revolutionary France. Think the Sad Puppies are annoying now? Wait until you’re trapped in a space-biome with them.

If we can’t physically move our civilisation to the distant stars, perhaps we can exchange Snapchats? Or use an “ansible”, which has become shorthand for any device that can communicate instantaneously between star systems since Ursula K Le Guin coined the term in Rocannon’s World (1966). In sci-fi, such superluminal communication is used to broker war and peace between galactic empires, when surely the actual utility of an ansible would be to let us vote for the 12-tentacled juggler in Universe’s Got Talent while our elites establish new tax havens on Tau Ceti.

Maybe the real key to star trekking isn’t a new kind of engine but a new kind of thinking. Not so long ago we thought the whole universe was made of interlocking celestial spheres made of quintessence. Today we use the metaphor of interwoven multiverses scattered with dark matter. As new evidence calls the big bang into question, it seems likely our mental model of the universe will continue to mutate. Perhaps that will open new paths to the stars. Or maybe we’ll realise that if we can see a world in a grain of sand, we don’t need to go anywhere to hold infinity in the palm of our hand.

