I interviewed a physicist once who told me that the kind of “warp speed” space-bending travel made famous by Star Trek wasn’t theoretically impossible. It’s just that we don’t know enough yet how to make it work. Something about requiring more energy than exists on the planet, at our current state of knowledge, or some small obstacle like that.
To many of us, warp-speed travel might sound far-fetched and crazy. But after spending a rainy winter morning immersed in a spectacular exhibit about Leonardo da Vinci at the San Jose Tech Museum, I have a sense that we’ll get there. For advanced space flight is surely no more far-reaching a concept now as human flight was 500 years ago, when Leonardo was trying to crack the code on that seemingly impossible feat. And then, too, one of his biggest problems was the lack of energy. It wasn’t the only issue, but without internal combustion technology to power a machine, even the most brilliant inventor was going to fall short.
