Most
people who haven’t been on an interstellar journey assume that it is extremely
exciting. I mean all the elements are there, you are going faster than the
speed of light, and you get to go somewhere no-one has ever been before, and so
on. This of course is a lie and space travel is in fact one of the most boring
things that humankind has ever managed to come up with. I don’t understand
physics and quite frankly the guys in engineering are so boring that I would
never let them explain it to me, but the reason we can now go faster than light
is something called “time dilation”. I don’t know what this means, I can
explain what it does though.
When
you get on the ship everything is normal, then the engine kicks in and all the
stuff outside the window starts moving slower and slower until after about a
day everything stops moving entirely. Also it all goes a bit blue for some
reason. I can’t remember if time outside stops or time inside moves faster, but
the second one is less terrifying to think about. The further you are going the
longer you spend with time stopped (for this trip it was two months). After
your time stuck like that there is a big red flash and you suddenly appear
where you want to end up two months (or whatever) after you had first fired up
the engine.
This
means you spend two months with almost nothing to do, seeing only the same
people who are on the ship with you and having to endure the same unmoving view
out of the window. I would say that the window thing would make you go insane
but apparently when they first started the ships didn’t have windows because
they thought it would just be dull to look at (it is) and one year long trip
ended up with everyone killing each other. I couldn’t do a year; the longest
trip I ever took was five months. That was the time I found the slime mould.
I’ll be honest it probably was just mud, in fact I know it was because I spent
the entire five month journey back trying to make it do something to show it
was alive. And it didn’t. I guess I just wanted to feel that I had managed to
do something instead of wasting an entire year.
Some
of the people on the ship spend most of the “journey” actually doing work, but
most of us are scientists and we don’t really have anything to do when we are
outbound. As the only biologist on a ship full of geologists and engineers I
don’t have much in common with the rest of the crew and I spend most of my time
reading or watching old movies. This next thing probably only confirms that
Roxy was right and I am a loser, but the reason I went into space was that I
used to love Star Trek, but after seeing about thirty dead rocks the “new life
and new civilizations” bit pissed me off so much I ejected the lot of it into
space.
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