Time for the Stars by Robert A. Heinlein

Larger is better on a long journey so people don’t get on each other’s nerves. The size of the crew, for instance, is important. Heinlein tells the story through Tom’s narration, and he looks at wide-range of questions about space travel. His brother, though, has lived through 71 years, and is 89. Of the Bartletts, Tom ends up being the one to go into space, and, after four years of travel, he returns.

In some, one telepath rides on one ship and the partner on another. In most cases, one twin stays on Earth while the other rides in a torchship. Tom and Pat Bartlett, identical teenage twins, turn out to be skilled telepaths, so they’re among a troop of telepaths - most, but not all, of them twins and triplets - who are signed up for the space exploration.

Other communications systems just don’t work when one of the parties is traveling so fast. And it’s the way the ships keep in contact with each other. In Time for the Stars, telepathy is the method that Earth uses to keep in contact with a fleet of twelve torchships sent to all points of the compass, travelling at near the speed of light, in a search for Earth-like planets to colonize. Telepathy, as an ability harnessed and employed by humans, often comes into play in Heinlein stories and books. Heinlein understood that, just as Earthlings get scared at the idea of an “unidentified flying object” being a ship from space, so would any intelligent life forms on a planet visited by an Earth rocket. “How does it feel to be a little green man in a flying saucer,” says one character as a ship from Earth prepares to land on a newfound world. Heinlein took that theory and ran with it.Īnd ran with a lot of other stuff as well, including telepathy, the search for Earth-like planets, the strategies of family dynamics, psychosomatic injuries, the psychology of siblings, the nature of life on other worlds and the meaning of “alien.”

In his 1956 book Time for the Stars, Robert A. I can’t claim to understand the mathematics or physics, but the idea is that time would be slowed down for the one in a rocket ship - to the extent that, on his return to Earth, he would find his twin much, much older than himself. One wrinkle had to do with how time would be experienced by someone on Earth as compared with someone else traveling in a rocket ship at near the speed of light. Back in 1905, Albert Einstein promulgated his relativity theory.

Time for the Stars by Robert A. Heinlein