When the taxi driver taking us to the Hop Head Beer Tour turned on the radio to listen to This American Life, the first segment of the show described a gathering of scientists, writers and people who were just plain into the idea of solving the problem of traveling between stars. “That sounds like your kind of group,” My Darling B commented.

The first big problem is, of course, distance. As one of the people on the show pointed out, the nearest star is four light years away, so that, even if you were moving at 99% the speed of light, it would take you four years to get there. (If you were moving at the speed of light, travel from here to there would be instantaneous, as far as you’re concerned, but to do that you would have to be light.)

I leaned over to tell B, “That star would be Barnard’s Star.*”

“Well, of course it would be,” B replied with a chuckle.

“Know how I know that? I read it in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.”

Damn, it’s good to be a space geek.

*It turns out my memory was faulty: According to Douglas Adams’s highly authoritative text, Alpha Centauri is four light-years away. The book never said how far away Barnard’s Star is – six light years. I had to look it up on Wikipedia.