Sandra Faber

You could think of the galaxy as a sort of stove with lots of pots on it, and the pots are the interstellar medium, like a chicken broth getting stronger with every reduction. Every time a supernova goes off and sends its heavy elements out into the interstellar medium, we cook up a stew that's better and better for solar systems and life.

American Scientist

David Grinspoon

What if life is not carbon-based? Can life exist as a gas or a plasma? Could planets or stars in some sense be alive? What about an interstellar cloud? Could life exist on such a small or large scale, or move so fast or so slowly that we wouldn't recognize it? Could you have an intelligent virus?

Martin Rees

Space doesn't offer an escape from Earth's problems. And even with nuclear fuel, the transit time to nearby stars exceeds a human lifetime. Interstellar travel is therefore, in my view, an enterprise for post-humans, evolved from our species not via natural selection, but by design.

British Scientist

Seth Shostak

Any beings advanced enough to traverse interstellar distances are at least a thousand years beyond our technical level. Spending gobs of time examining our missiles is equivalent to sending the Air Force back to the Middle Ages and insisting they examine the chain mail factories.

Kip Thorne

I became interested in this question of whether you can build wormholes for interstellar travel. I realized that if you had a wormhole, the theory of general relativity by itself would permit you to go backward in time.

American Physicist

Barney Oliver

The factor most ignored in discussing interstellar flight is the kinetic energy that must be invested in the ship to make its tons of matter move at a substantial fraction of the speed of light.

Scientist

Frank Tipler

Human uploads have such a natural advantage over present-day people in the environment of space, it's exceedingly unlikely flesh-and-blood beings will ever engage in interstellar travel.

Physicist

Edward M. Lerner

What kind of hard SF do I write? Everything from near-future, Earth-centric techno-thrillers to far-future, far-flung interstellar epics.

American Author

Jill Tarter

We don't know how to identify intelligence over interstellar distances, so what we do instead is use technology for a proxy.

Bonnie Hammer

There's so much interest and curiosity about alien life, interstellar travel. It's always in the news.

American Businessman

Often used in subjects like astronomy or sci-fi to describe events or distances beyond Earth's atmosphere.

Space Context

'Interstellar' is not to be confused with 'international', which relates to things between nations, not stars.

Not International

Used when referring to vast spaces or distances, indicating something very far from our own solar system.

Immense Distances

 Also, we were still in the magnetosphere, so they had protection from radiation. Still, more radiation than they'd have if they were where we are, but we don't know what's going to happen when you put a person in sort of interstellar, interplanetary travel for seven months. We don't know. We know already that you lose bone mass.

Sending Humans to Mars:...

 solar activities that we have ever seen, Alright? So lots of gamma rays, bad stuff are... the sun burped, bad stuff goes flying through interstellar space. So what did we do? First time ever when we were flying a spacecraft into deep space we actually rebooted the computer.

The Curious Life of a...

 some will be too far away and they'll freeze. Abiogenesis -- the creation of life from nonlife -- that's the second barrier. The basic building blocks of life aren't unique to amino acids have been found in comets, complex organic molecules in interstellar dust clouds,

Where are all the...

 More importantly, I think this visitor from afar has really brought home the point that our solar system isn't isolated. We're part of a much larger environment, and in fact, we may even be surrounded by interstellar visitors and not even know it.

The story of 'Oumuamua,...

 where humanity rules the stars in a giant feudal empire. This medieval motif goes beyond just the government. Unlike most interstellar sci-fi, Herbert's humans conquered the stars without any computers. Following an ancient war with robots,

Why should you read...

 an astronaut going on an interstellar mission look up and experience the first point of emotion at this point we know we won't see the sky again for another eight hours as we descend it gets darker and darker the deeper we go the greater

Journey 1000m Below The...

 including that actually might be inhabitable by humans. And so I envision that our descendants, hundreds of years from now, will embark on an interstellar journey to other worlds. And they will look back at all of us

Sara Seager: The search...

 first of all tell you why I believe pursuing an extraordinary tomorrow that is human interstellar travel is really necessary in order for us to build a better world today and the reason it's necessary is because it

Want interstellar...

 That life could be benevolent, as we would hope to be if humans are one day able to achieve interstellar travel. Or it could be hostile. Searching for planets that might have life means staring into a great abyss.

Should we be looking for...

 will we ever be able to plant a flag in the most distant quadrants of the cosmos we are not going to achieve interstellar flight in our lifetime we may be as far from reaching other stars as Leonardo da