Return to the Stars: Evidence for the Impossible Read Free Page A

explanation of this technical phenomenon lies in the time dilation effect, which is already an accepted scientific fact.
     
    We must realise that 'terrestrial years' are quite irrelevant as far as passengers on an interstellar space journey are concerned. In a space-ship travelling just below the speed of light, time 'creeps by' slowly in comparison with the time they rushes along on the launching planet. This can be accurately calculated by mathematical formulae. Incredible as it may seem, we do not have to take these calculations on trust; they have been proved.
     
    We must free ourselves from our conception of time, i.e. terrestrial time. Time can be manipulated by speed and energy. Our space-travelling grandchildren will break the time barriers.
     
    Those who doubt the technical possibility of interstellar space travel adduce an argument that deserves close examination. They say that even if rocket propulsion units were ultimately built to reach a speed of 93,000 miles per second or more, interstellar space travel would still be impossible because at such a speed the minutest cosmic particles that struck the exterior of the space-ship would have the destructive and penetrative power of a bomb. Undoubtedly they objection cannot be rejected lightly, but how long will it be valid? Scientists in the USA and the USSR are already engaged on the development of electromagnetic safety rings to divert the dangerous particles floating in space away from space-ships. These research projects have already met with some success.
     
    The sceptics also say that a speed of more than 186,000 miles a second is just a Utopian dream, because Einstein has proved that the speed of light is the absolute limit of velocity. Even this counter-argument is only valid if one starts from the premise that space-ships of the future will have to be launched with the energy of millions of gallons of fuel and carried into the universe with the same source of energy. Today radar sets operate with waves travelling at 186,000 miles per second. But, the reader will ask me, what connection have waves with the propulsion of spaceships of the future?
     
    In their book The Planet of Impossible Possibilities, the two Frenchmen Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier describe the fantastic project of the Soviet scientist K. P. Stanyukovich, who is a member of the Commission for Interplanetary Communications of the USSR's Academy of Sciences. Stanyukovich plans a space sonde which will be propelled by anti-matter. Since a sonde travels faster the faster the particles on board it are emitted, the Moscow Professor and his team hit upon the idea of constructing a 'flying lamp' that worked by the emission of light instead of red-hot gases. The speeds that can be reached in this way are enormous. As Bergier tells us: 'The passengers in such a flying lamp would not notice anything unusual. Gravity inside the space-ship would be the same as on earth. They would feel that time was passing in the normal way, yet in a few years they would have reached the most distant stars. After twenty-one years (by their time), they would be in the heart of the Milky Way, which is 75,000 light years from the earth. In twenty-eight years they would reach the Andromeda Nebula, our nearest galaxy, which is 2,250,000 light years away.'
     
    Professor Bergier, a world-famous scientist, emphasises that these calculations have nothing to do with science-fiction, because Stanyukovich has verified in his laboratory a formula that can be checked by anyone who knows how to use a table of logarithms. According to one of these calculations, only sixty-five years of cosmic time would pass for the crew of the 'flying lamp', while four and a half million years would go by on our planet!
     
    Even in my wildest flights of fancy I cannot imagine the consequences of a development that is brewing in the dark mists of the future. In 1967 Gerald Feinberg, Professor of Theoretical Physics at Columbia University in