Welcome to the Council of Tren Podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.

Her Ardua Adastra, Latin 4th through adversity to the stars, it is the motto of the Royal Air Force and other Air Force of the Commonwealth.

And today I want to talk about a particular kind of adversity for us to get to other stars. And that will be traveling on a generational spaceship.

So welcome to the Council of Tren Podcast, I'm your host, Catholic Answers Apologist, Tren Horn.

On Mondays and Wednesdays we talk apologetics and theology, but on Friday we talk about whatever I want to talk about.

And today I want to talk about something from science fiction that people, you know, a lot of things begin as science fiction, but eventually turn into science fact.

I mean there's things in Star Trek that we obviously can't do now, we can't travel to other planets, we don't have a transporter.

But the communication devices on Star Trek, you know, basically they're essentially the lifehones, little FaceTime cameras that the crew would have.

At least that would have been on the original with Captain Kirk, with Shatner.

We have that now, so it's interesting to see what science fiction exists today and what is still waiting to exist.

But there was an idea for a generational starship that would go all the way back to I think a Goddard, Robert Goddard, as part of the Goddard Research Center, Rocket Pioneer, Robert Goddard.

He spoke about this in an article or book called the Ultimate Migration, that was written back in 1918.

And so the idea is, you know, space is big, right? And if you want to try to get anywhere, it's huge distances to traverse, even if you're going really fast.

I mean, the nearest star to our star, that'd be, is it Proximus, Centauri, Alpha Centauri System, that's four light years.

And you're not going to be able to travel at the speed of light.

Because if you try to travel at the speed of light, the amount of energy that you would need is also going to increase the closer that you get to the speed of light.

So if you manage to travel at the speed of light, you know, you're going to have to use infinite amounts of energy to be able to traverse.

It's, you're going to have all kinds of problems with relativity. Nothing is going to be going that fast.

So let's suppose you can at least make it 10% light speed, leaving it 10% light speed to get to the nearest star to our own.

That would take 40 years of space travel.

So the idea is that, what if you had a ship that was sort of an interstellar arc?

And the goal of the ship was that it would hum its way along and generations would pass aboard this ship.

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