14 Track 14

Review unit 3

fluency practice

review reading 5

Space Travel and Science Fiction

Page 167

Space travel and science fiction

Space travel and science fiction have long been connected. Writers of science fiction, as well as creators of science fiction TV shows, and movies, often study the latest scientific concepts and use or adapt them to help portray what future space travel, space ships, and space stations might look like.

In turn, science fiction writers such as Jules Vern have dreamed up ideas and concepts of space travel which inspired generations of scientists and engineers to develop new space technologies.

Jules Vern (1828-1905) was a French author and a pioneer of science fiction. In his novels From the Earth to the Moon (1865) and Around the Moon (1870), a kind of space ship is fired at the moon from a 900-foot-long cannon.

At one point in their journey, the three travelers are deprived of gravity and float around their small ship. Rockets are used to slow the ship down before landing on the moon.

Given the time in which he was writing, Vern’s predictions were very good. The size of his space ship was about the size of the first one to go to the moon, the Apollo, minus its large rockets.

Both Verne’s ship and the Apollo carried three people into space. Furthermore, rockets were indeed used by the Apollo to slow its descent.

However, Vern’s ship shot his travelers into space, which never could have worked. The intense pressure of firing a spaceship the way one would fire a bullet from a gun would cause great physiological damage to the crew.

During the first half of the 20th century, science fiction novels and comic books were very popular in the United States. Their portrayal of space travel was less far-fetched than Vern’s and were often based on the space research of that time.

For example, pictures began showing astronauts in space suits when writers realized that exposing human beings to the cold, airless environment of space was lethal. Ideas of other planets were still often wrong, though.

A 1928 drawing of a moon circling the planet Jupiter shows it covered in plant life. It was only discovered later that the other planets and moons around our sun are without life as we know it on Earth.

Drawings in the early 20th century also showed very large space ships and stations, almost like floating cities. Writers at the time knew that trips to other stars would take hundreds of years.

Those who left Earth would die on the journey there, leaving their descendants to arrive at the destination instead.

Some writers addressed this problem by using the concept of suspended animation − a deep sleep in which a person doesn’t grow older. Such travelers would awaken at the end of their journey, hundreds of years in the future.

It is not impossible that these ideas could become reality one day. As the American space program began to grow, the television series Star Trek became very popular. The series follows the adventures of a large space ship with over 400 crew members that flies around the universe at “warp speed,” going faster than the speed of light.

This is a wonderful dream, but it will probably never be realized. According to the current laws of physics, it is impossible for any object to travel faster than the speed of light.

Science fiction has walked hand in hand with advances in science and technology, and writers continue to study scientific concepts and to use them to portray the future.

Looking back at their ideas, some were correct and cannot be distinguished from today’s reality; many others were nothing but fiction.

However, science fiction writers continue to inspire new generations of people to dream of someday going into space.