I saw Star Wars and 2001: A Space Odyssey each once, in the 1970’s in Chicago.  I hardly remember even what they were about.  From Star Wars, I remember some actor with a black veil over his face who was supposed to be king of the universe.  From 2001: A Space Odyssey, all I remember was some actor eating supper and listening to Beethoven who was supposed to have moved a castle brick by brick.  As for Star Trek, I half-saw one program in 1978 when I was invited to dinner at somebody’s house.  I recall an actor with pointed ears standing at the controls of a spaceship.

So when Frederick Smith pops these words and phrases, like ‘hyperspace’ and ‘warp drive’, into his articles, it scares me, because I think that he must have much more sophisticated information at his fingertips than I.  So I check it out online, and find out that ‘warp drive’ and ‘hyperspace’ came, not from NASA, not from Einstein, not from some astronomical observatory, but from television, more precisely, from Star Trek.  No wonder I don’t know about it! I don’t watch television, and for the very reason that it is false.  Immediately, I get the mental picture of Frederick Smith, with his wife and children, curled up before their TV set, with pizza, popcorn and soft drinks.  Being aged and alone, I guess I can envy him his blissful family life there in the Midwest somewhere, but I don’t know how far I could rely on his astrophysical insights.

Even such phenomena as ‘four-space’, ‘space curvature’, ‘time dilatation’, ‘black holes’ and ‘worm holes’, though they have been mooted about by the scientific community for generations, are very unlikely to play any significant role in any imaginable space travel that the human race may undertake in decades or even centuries.

At 86.6% of the speed of light, time dilatation amounts to 50%, which means that people aboard a spaceship moving at that high speed would live two years while only one year was elapsing for the people watching them from planet Earth.  That of course is a considerable gain.  But at 3% of the speed of light, time dilatation amounts to 99.95%, which means that the people on the ship would live one year and four hours, while the tellurian observers lived one year.  So time dilatation doesn’t enter as a significant factor into any kind of space travel that we can expect in the foreseeable future.  We can’t even expect 3% of the speed of light for the present.  That would be 130 times faster than our current top speed.

Wormholes, which are theoretical shortcuts through space, exist so far only on paper, the result of the manipulation of equations.  These may arise in conjunction with very heavy bodies called black holes, which consist of so much mass that all light, matter and gravitational fields in the region are drawn inescapably into them.  However, the likelihood that there are any black holes or worm holes in any region of space that earthly astronauts could expect to reach, even at 10% of the speed of light, within centuries or even millennia is negligible.   So it is utterly pointless to invoke them, as Smith has done, in a discussion of the human conquest of space.

Similarly, four-dimensional distances in no way abolish the three-dimensional distances that astronauts would have to traverse.  The four-dimensional distance between Alpha Centauri in 1996 and the Earth in 2000 is 0, but the three-dimensional distance remains 4 light-years, and that is what we would have to cross.

The sort of space that we would be navigating, that is, a region with a radius of say 100 light-years, in which our speed would be 10% the speed of light or likely much less, will prove to be very Newtonian, with no curvature, no black holes, no worm holes, no dilatation, no four-space geodesics, no warp drive, no hyperspace.  Any two points within that 100-light-year sphere will have a very definite topological distance function that nothing will ever circumvent.  If point A is 17.2185 light-years from point B, there is absolutely nothing that will change the distance.  And there will never be a way to travel it by going less than 17.2185 light-years.

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