James O’Donoghue recently lamented his sense of “despair at the distances involved in our solar system and beyond” in an article Former NASA Scientist Demonstrates Why Star Trek’s Warp Speeds Are Painfully Slow.

He’s put together some very cool animations that detail how at even the supra ordinate light speed of star trek’s fastest warp 9.99 (apparently 2,083 times the speed of light) it would still take a space farer 18 hours to reach Proxima Cnetari – the closest star to our own sun.

Even at this ludicrous speed, it would take longer than an average human life time to get to the other side of our own Milky Way galaxy. Relativistic physics posits dangerous and serious limitations to faster than light speed much less  exceeding it by many factors. But even if we could jump to 9,99 warp speed on a real Starship Enterprise, travelling to the nearest galaxy to our own Milky Way, Andromeda, would take over 300 years.

As of 2023, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe is the fastest ship ever built, but it travels at a comical, snail’s pace of 163 km/s (586,800 km/h). It will take this probe 17,450 years to reach Poxima Centari and about 150 million years to get to the other side of the Milky Way. It’s not even worth calculating how long it will take to get to Andromeda.

So, I can see why O’Donoghue feels disgruntled by all this and wants to share this with the world and by proxy sink the believability of the likes of Star Trek, Star Wars and the dozens of other great science fiction fantasy stories I’ve loved since I was a child.

Although I sympathize, I feel the man, in his frustration, is forgetting about the crucial and often overlooked ingredient of all scientific, and actually any human, endeavour.

Imagination.

Have you ever watched the first science fiction film that was made way back in 1902 – “Le Voyage dans la Lune” (A trip to the moon) – by the brilliant French film maker Georges Méliès? The silent film, in its jagged, black and white, slightly accelerated way, shows the tale of a crew of explorers who are shot to the moon, inside a giant shell, form the largest canon ever made. Upon landing, there is not only air and snow, but a civilisation of anthropomorphic natives that turn out to be quite unfriendly. After lots of dramatic fighting and running away, the crew eventually escapes by the skin of their teeth to fall back into the ocean of the earth. Back then, most people laughed at him. Today, the rational mind views his story as ludicrous, but it is here where I feel guys like O’Donoghue are getting too stuck in the cold, limited recesses of their left brains.

Georges Méliès film was a visionary product of genius. Regardless of the script and the misconceptions and made up facts that retrospect reveals now, his story set fire to the imaginations of countless film makers and science fiction writers who would in turn inspire the grandchildren of that generation to physically put a man on the moon a mere 67 years later.

So we really are limited only by our imaginations – not by our science.

All of human history, everything we’ve ever built, has come from this numinous and very little understood faculty that has been action in us since we began over riding our instinctual fear of fire,  separating us from our animal brethren. Sure, we needed science to get us to the moon, but the scientific innovation of NASA was merely the cart. The horse, the impetus, was the imagination of people like Georges Méliès and the countless that came after him who dared to dream into doing the impossible which has now become an everyday fact of life which most people sadly find rather boring or come up with stupid conspiracy theories about how it was all a hoax. Without imagination there is no science and imagination is anything but rational.

The most paradoxically reasonable solution to the problem of space travel is found in Dune. In Frank Herbert’s master work of science fiction, the substance Melange (known as the “spice”) is alchemically created by the giant worms and the extreme conditions of heat on the planet Arrakis. Containing uniquely powerful hallucinogenic properties, the spice serves to extend consciousness, allowing the Guild Navigator’s body and minds to evolve sufficiently to fold space – to travel without moving.

Herbert’s “spice” is just a grandiose symbol to what we understand as human consciousness and imagination. The spice and all of us, writers and readers and lovers of science fiction, are the worms of Arrakis. It’s just a matter of time before there is enough melange available to create the reality of folding space, or something akin to it currently beyond our understanding. But I don’t believe that this will be for very long. Georges Méliès canon was not that far off from predicting the powerful rockets built to carry Neil Armstrong to the moon. We just need to keep our collective imaginations alive and well feed, so we can explore our own galaxy beyond the limitations of light speed. I have no doubt we’ll get there one day.