May 11, 2025
Cowboy Bebop kind of handles faster than light travel in a more realistic way than most sci-fi. There’s not really much of a point to immediately striking out and starting colonies out around unexplored stars, much more cost-effective to just use it to get around our own Solar System faster at first.
The critical element being that faster than light travel is not instantaneous travel. If you can travel at light speed and no faster, then you can jet around from Earth to Pluto in less than an hour, but it will still take four years to reach Alpha Centauri, and more than fifty thousand years to cross the Milky Way.
