The Myth of the Starship - Scifi author Charles Stross thinks that starships will never happen; at least not in the conventional sense. In a recent article he argues that instead of hauling “ugly bags of mostly water” across the void, our future will be one of transferring the human consciousness as information onto an artificial substrate (thus making it much more suitable to space travel).
What intrigues me is the possibility that the entire conceptual framework of the starship is a dangerously misleading dead-end, and that what we need is a new framework for thinking about interstellar travel.
The very word “starship” is a concatenation of two other words — star, and ship. The first is pretty harmless; it merely defines the scale factor we’re talking about, as opposed to interplanetary ship, or moon ship, or Atlantic-crossing steam ship. But the second word comes with a whole freightload of unwanted baggage, and I’m of a mind that serious futurists or SF writers might want to think about ditching it completely and looking for something new.
space engineer, scifi author, technology maven, and addicted to beauty in all forms - the best is always yet to come ...
