Star dreck about Gliese 581g

The Tyee has published my article Who Cares If Some Planet Is Inhabitable? Excerpt:

Back in the 1980s, my editor suggested I write a space opera. I did, but it wasn't easy. For the life of me, I couldn't imagine an advanced civilization that would bother to travel between stars. Better to send just information. Then your interstellar pen pals could grow their own humans from our genome, and you could grow your own aliens right here at home. I did include an interstellar invasion, by a species that was out to convert everyone else to its own religion. In other words, the species was crazy. 

Nonetheless, SF is still full of star fleets, galactic empires, and aliens who are a lot like us. And we still dream of starships spreading human beings to exotic worlds. 

We're kidding ourselves. The Scottish SF writer Charles Stross, probably the best writer in the genre today, has demolished the whole idea of Star Trek-style interstellar travel -- just by crunching the numbers.

Comments

[Ben Godby]

I think to understand why space opera is popular, you've got to think about how humans are a lot more than number-crunching machines. If you put material scarcity aside for a minute, but hold on even to the basic facts of the universe like light speed limitations, undoubtedly humans would still one day go to the stars--they'd wait a thousand years to do it if they had to. There's people living out in the desert here on Earth, and I don't doubt we'd build shelters on a gas giant if we could.

Numbers, they're just numbers. You can't count spirit.

-bn

[Bruce H. Johnson]

Figures don't lie, but liars can figure. Remember, physicists have proved a bumblebee couldn't fly.

We will always have adventurers. When something new gets discovered, they want to dive in.

If Busch Gardens opened a new park in your neighborhood, would you just look at the publicity photos or would you go visit? -- especially if it were free.

We're not all alike. Magic Mountain (Southern California) is maybe a half-hour north of me, yet I've never been there. Still, they've been in business quite a while now since there always seem to be adventurers wanting to experience it.