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INTERSTELLAR TRAVEL

The first serious speculation about interplanetary travel may have been that of John Wilkins, Bishop of Chester, who in 1640 added a new ‘proposition’ to a re-titled edition of his The Discovery of a World in the Moone (1638). Drawing upon the observations of Galileo, Wilkins had suggested that the Moon was a world like our own, that believing this did not contradict Christian belief and that it could well be inhabited. His fourteenth ‘proposition’ in A Discourse Concerning a New Planet went even further. It stated, “That tis possible for some of our posteritie, to find out a conveyance to this other world; and if there be inhabitants there, to have commerce with them.” True, we needed to find out a way to actually find out this “conveyance” but, while other Moon voyages used a convenient waterspout (Lucian of Samosata), the miraculous power of evaporating dew (Cyrano de Bergerac), or even harnessing a flock of geese (Wilkins’ contemporary Francis Godwin), Wilkins argued simply that it could be possible given enough human ingenuity. We now know that some of his assumptions (such as that there was air between the worlds) are untrue, but space travel was a serious proposition rather than a satirical jest and during the nineteenth century writers were speculating about visiting other planets long before the actuality of achieving powered flight within the atmosphere had happened. In fact, in Robert Coles’ The Struggle for Empire (1900) we have a vast interstellar British Empire thanks to the discovery of antigravity and the forces... Read More..