Interstellar Space Travel Will Never, Ever Happen

It's basically impossible and they know it.

I recently found out that this…

...with the magic and the dragons, is apparently much more likely to become real in the future than this:

And I’m not talking about Star Trek’s utopian ideal of space socialism, I’m talking about interstellar travel. It will never be a thing. It turns out that starships exist on the exact same level of plausibility as wizards and it’s kind of weird that, as a culture, we assume the former will someday be reality. What the hell is going on here?

Before we go any further, the controversial novel I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom is finally out in paperback, get it at Amazon, B&N, Bookshop or wherever you like to buy books. Includes a free preview chapter of my next novel!

1. Every sci-fi space opera is based on literal magic

I feel like an idiot because this is something that apparently everyone with any education on the subject already knew? The fact that travel to another solar system is basically impossible has been written about in excruciating detail by much smarter people (including this article and this one, I thought this was also good). It’s easy to get bogged down in the technical details (it’s rocket science) so I’ll try to bring this down to my own level of understanding, of an unremarkable man who got a Broadcasting degree from Southern Illinois University:

First of all, it turns out that the ships in Star Trek, Star Wars, Dune etc. are not based on some kind of hypothetical technology that could maybe exist someday with better energy sources and materials (as I had thought). In every case, their tech is the equivalent of just having Albus Dumbledore in the engine room cast a teleportation spell. Their ships skip the vast distances of space entirely, arriving at their destinations many times faster than light itself could have made the trip. Just to be clear, there is absolutely no remotely possible method for doing this, even on paper.

“Well, science does the impossible all the time!” some of you say, pointing out that no one 200 years ago could have conceived of landing a rover on Mars. But I’m saying that expecting science to develop real warp drives, hyperspace or wormhole travel is asking it to utterly break the fundamental laws of the universe, no different than expecting to someday have a time machine, or a portal to a parallel dimension. These are plot devices, not science.

Experts can correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems like if you had two agencies with infinite budgets, one dedicated to developing interstellar space travel and the other dedicated to giving a young child all of the magical abilities of Harry Potter, the latter would get to the finish line first. Both would be tasked with bending the laws of physics in equally unlikely ways, but the second one wouldn’t have to also keep dozens of humans alive indefinitely in a frozen radioactive vacuum that is relentlessly trying to murder them every single second of the day.

I’m sure some of you think I’m exaggerating, and maybe I am, but keep in mind…

2. We all think space is roughly a billion times smaller than it actually is

The reason space operas rely on literal magic to make their plots work is that there is no non-magic way to get over the fact that stars are way, way farther apart than the average person understands. Picture in your mind the distance between earth and Proxima Centauri, the next closest star. Okay, now mentally multiply that times one billion and you’re probably closer to the truth. “But I can’t mentally picture one billion of anything!” I know, that’s the point. The concept of interstellar travel as it exists in the public imagination is based entirely on that public being physically incapable of understanding the frankly absurd distances involved.

When you hear that the next star is 4.25 light years away, that doesn’t sound that far—in an average sci-fi TV show, that trip would occur over a single commercial break. But that round trip is 50 trillion miles. I realize that’s a number so huge as to be meaningless, so let’s break it down:

Getting a human crew to the moon and back was a gigantic pain in the ass and that round trip is about half a million miles, it takes a week or so. The reason we haven’t yet set foot on Mars despite having talked about it constantly for decades is because that trip—which is practically next door in space terms—is the equivalent of going to the moon and back six hundred fucking times in a row without stopping. The round trip will take three years. It will cost half a trillion dollars or more. But of course it will; all of the cutting-edge tech on the spacecraft has to work perfectly for three straight years with no external support whatsoever. There will be no opportunity to stop for repair, there can be no surprises about how the equipment or the astronauts hold up for 300 million miles in the harshest conditions imaginable (and the radiation alone is a nightmare).

Okay, well, the difference between the Mars trip and a journey to the next closest star is roughly the difference between walking down the block to your corner store and walking from New York City to Sydney, Australia. Making it to Proxima Centauri would be like doing that Mars trip, which is already a mind-boggling technical challenge that we’re not even sure is worth doing, about 170,000 times in a row without stopping. At current spaceship speeds, it would take half a million motherfucking years. That is, a hundred times longer than all of human recorded history.

I’m grossly oversimplifying the math but, if anything, those numbers still downplay the difficulty. To get the trip down to a single human lifetime, you’d need to get a ship going so absurdly fast that the physics challenges become ludicrous. In the hopelessly optimistic scenario that we could get something going a tenth of the speed of light (that is, thousands of times faster than our Mars ship, or anything that we even kind of know how to build), that means running into a piece of space debris the size of a grain of sand would impact the hull with the force of a nuclear explosion.

And that’s still a round trip of over 80 years, so this would be a one-way suicide mission for the astronauts. This is a spacecraft that must contain everything the crew could possibly need over the course of their entire lives. So we’re talking about an enormous ship (which would be 99.99% fuel storage), with decades’ worth of groceries, spare parts, clothes, medical supplies and anything they could possibly need for any conceivable failure scenario, plus a life support system that basically mimics earth in every way (again, with enough redundancies and backups to persist through every possible disaster). Getting something that big going that fast would require far more energy than the total that our civilization has ever produced. And if anything goes wrong, there would be no rescue.

All of that, just for . . . what? To say we did it?

Now, we could definitely send an unmanned probe there to take pictures. They’re tiny by comparison, you can get them going much faster without squishing the crew and you don’t have to worry about bringing them back. It’s the difference between trying to jump over the Grand Canyon versus just shooting a bullet across it. But unmanned probes aren’t the fantasy.

3. Every proposed solution to the above problems is utterly ridiculous

“What about putting the crew in suspended animation?” you ask. “Like in the Alien franchise. Ripley was adrift in her hypersleep pod for half a century and she didn’t age a day! You wouldn’t need to store all that food, air and water and it’s fine if the trip takes longer than a lifetime!”

See, this is what drives me crazy about this subject, we keep mistaking slapdash tropes invented by sci-fi writers for actual plausible science. I mean, think about what we’re saying here: “Crews could survive the long trip if we just invent human immortality.”

You’re talking about a pod that can just magically halt the aging process. And as depicted, it is magic; these people are emerging from their years-long comas (during which they were not eating or drinking) with no wrinkles, brain damage, muscle atrophy, or bedsores. Their hair doesn’t even grow. The only way that could happen is if the pods literally freeze time, like goddamned Zack Morris on Saved by the Bell. It’s as scientific as showing the astronauts drinking a magic potion that grants eternal youth, brewed from unicorn tears.

“What about generation ships,” you say, “I’ve read sci-fi novels where they set up a whole society on a ship with the idea that it will be their great-grandchildren who will reach the destination and establish a colony!”

Okay, now you’re just pissing me off. You’re talking about an act that would get everyone involved put in front of a tribunal. What happens when the first generation born on the ship finds out they’ve been doomed to live their entire lives imprisoned on this cramped spacecraft against their will?

Imagine them all hitting their teen years and fully realizing they’ve been severed from the rest of humanity, cut off from all of the pleasures of both nature and civilization. These middle generations won’t even have the promise of seeing the destination; they will live and die with only the cold blackness of space outside their windows. They will never take a walk through the woods, never swim in a lake, never sit on a beach, or breathe fresh air, or meet their extended families. They will not know what it is to travel to a new city or eat at a fancy restaurant or have any of the careers depicted in their media about Earth. They will have no freedom whatsoever, not even to raise their children the way they want—the mission will require them to work specific jobs and breed specific offspring that can fill specific roles. They will live knowing their parents deprived them of absolutely everything good about the human experience, without their consent, before they were even born.

If you’re insisting this could be figured out somehow, that the future will come up with a special system of indoctrination that will guarantee there are no munities, riots, crimes or weird cults, just think about what you’re saying here: “We can make this work if we just solve literally all of the flaws in human psychology, morality and socialization.”

4. If we could do this, we could just fix everything else instead

For the writers of Star Trek to make interstellar travel as comfortable as depicted requires an essentially infinite energy source (the equivalent of powering our entire planet with a handful of crystals) a replicator that can literally manufacture any goods out of thin air at zero cost, medicine that can cure any wound or disease instantly, engines that can travel at thousands of times the speed of light, technology to manipulate gravity itself and a ship made of materials that can withstand the kind of forces that would rip the sun in half. Complete with windows!

All of this is affordable enough that they can build a whole bunch of these ships without bankrupting the rest of society. And already lots of you are saying that an iPhone would seem just as implausible to a pessimist in 1825, especially if you told them that it was powered by electricity generated from splitting atoms.

Okay, so let’s say all of that Star Trek technology will be commonplace at some point in our actual future. In that scenario, what would life on earth look like? We’re not just talking about a civilization with infinite energy and goods, we’re talking about advancing to the point that all known laws of physics are malleable, where it’s trivial to bend time and space, where any conceivable object can be instantly summoned out of thin air. Forget about how the Earth is depicted in these shows; it would be a civilization where everyone would live like gods, where all known physical limitations are essentially meaningless.

I fully expect some smarter person to rebut this post with huge blocks of math that I’m much too dumb to understand, but this part of the equation seems dead simple: If a civilization has successfully developed the technology to make interstellar travel reliable, common and comfortable, then it by definition is at a level of tech where an average citizen could (for example) buy a “wand” that can summon an object out of thin air, make it levitate, then instantly teleport it and the user to another location. It’s a world where we’d have engineered dogs that can talk and will have built glowing alabaster cities in the sky where people live forever. And it’s absolutely a world where a real, live fire-breathing dragon could be grown in a lab.

So for everyone replying that this is all doomer pessimism because science is constantly bringing into reality wonders that were previously seen as magic, how would you respond to a teenager saying she wants to be a dragon rider when she grows up? If anything is possible, why not that?

5. Why am I so mad about this?

I have no problem with fantasy. I write fiction for a living, I spend much of my waking hours daydreaming about things that cannot possibly happen. I know that imagination is what inspires humanity to new frontiers etc. But I feel like this particular fantasy was pushed on me as a quasi-religious belief. Not just that interstellar travel is the future, but that it is the whole point of our civilization.

There’s an old quote from CS Lewis about how science is good at making sure our proverbial boats don’t sink and morality is good at making sure they don’t intentionally crash into one another, but neither can tell us where the boats are supposed to be going.* We’re still stuck with that question of what is the ultimate point of all this. “To create a better world for our children!” you might say, but to a lot of us, that sounds like we’re just making the proverbial boats more and more comfortable while they continue to sail in circles.

For my whole life, colonizing the stars was that ultimate goal, the thing we were all shooting for. Star Trek portrays it as a natural maturation process in which all societies must get their act together and, once they’ve advanced to that stage, can join the galactic community. But part of the pitch was that this would be done on starships more comfortable than our apartments...

...and that we’d be landing on alien planets so similar to earth that we could just walk around in our office clothes. Same gravity, same air, better weather. You don’t even need a jacket.

It was understood that, sure, this is a Hollywood fantasy but that some version of it will exist in the future and that this is the thing we should be working toward as a species. “But what’s wrong with having this to aspire to,” you ask, and my answer is... everything? This fantasy was always based on the idea that, at some point, we’re going to squeeze all of the juice out of earth and so will be forced to venture out and find something better. But the idea that there is something better out there isn’t just a lie—it’s a stupid, borderline malicious one.

You can talk about how exploration of the unknown lies at the heart of the heroic human spirit and so on, but here’s the thing: There’s an earthlike planet much closer to us that we haven’t even tried all that hard to explore. It’s called Earth. We’re not putting cities under the ocean or in the arctic because, well, why would we? The conditions are so harsh and the logistics so daunting that it would be a bizarre waste of money and resources. “Nobody wants to live in a place where you could die if you stray too far from shelter!” Okay, well, Mars is a million times worse, and a colony there would be a million times more expensive (side note: colonizing Mars is also basically impossible).

The logistics of the fantasy make no sense because it was never about that, it was always about nerds like me daydreaming of just getting away, because the world as we know it is messy and crowded and boring. But the solution to that isn’t to imagine a better, accessible planet somewhere out there in the void. There isn’t one. If it depresses you to imagine humans still confined to Earth 1,000 years from now, it’s your imagination that has gone wrong because that is, inarguably, the best case scenario.

*I am paraphrasing him to an irresponsible degree

My controversial novel I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom is finally out in paperback, get it at Amazon, B&N, Bookshop or wherever you like to buy books.