Staying in 'Contact' with Carl Sagan

Though one of my personal heroes has been deceased for many years, he still touches base with me every so often through the amazing body of work that he left behind.  Carl Sagan, science guru extraordinaire, penned some tremendous science non-fiction, from Cosmos to Demon-Haunted World, but also a fair bit of science fiction.  I just finished reading Contact (1985), his first novel, which would eventually become a feature film (1997, the year after he passed) that I have yet to see.

Contact is a tremendous novel by many standards, but one measure is the extent to which it has permeated my consciousness, and it has a great deal.  While reading this tale of a message from an alien civilization and an eventual visit, and in the weeks since, I have stared a bit longer at the stars at night, captivated by the scale of the universe.  I wonder if there are beings on another planet looking up in similar awe at a view not so different from mine.

NASA Aims for Faster than Light Space Travel

Perhaps you have heard that NASA has recently set its sights on building a spacecraft that can traverse space at a rate greater than 300,000 km/s - the speed of light.  The final product may well arrive a century from now, but at first glance, the very prospect of a spacecraft exceeding the speed of light seems to violate special relativity.  One of the first things we learn when studying relativistic physics is that 300,000 km/s is a cosmic speed limit.

Before investigating this apparent violation of physical law, let us examine what a faster than light speed spacecraft really means in the context of current space travel standards.