Chapter 7:
Science Fiction – A Reality Check

This section examines the boundary between science and speculative fiction, emphasizing both the current limits of human knowledge and the challenges of imagining beyond them. It opens with practical and philosophical constraints: engineering limitations, evolutionary timescales, and environmental dependencies prevent humans from easily colonizing other planets like Mars. Maintaining artificial ecosystems, simulating Earth’s gravity, and coexisting with Earth-dependent species highlight the complexity of interplanetary life.

The text also considers alien life, suggesting that extraterrestrial organisms would be bound by the same evolutionary and physical rules as Earth life. Questions arise about how alien intelligence might develop, its potential objectives, and the feasibility of colonization outside of its home environment.

Time travel, telepathy, and AI are discussed as areas where science fiction intersects with theoretical physics, illustrating the grey area between imaginative speculation and scientific plausibility. The author stresses that while some concepts—like telepathic transfer or time travel—currently defy empirical validation, they invite exploration and theoretical consideration.

Finally, the text encourages careful distinction between theoretical physics, which is grounded in observation and experimentation, and science fiction, which extrapolates current knowledge to explore possibilities, sometimes bending or ignoring established rules.