Buzz Aldrin said that space travel is fantastically slow -it takes 40 years to get to Alpha Centauri and we know there�s not that much there. It�s not as exciting as science fiction.

Yeah, it is somewhat sad that that science fiction is sort of spinning all of these ideas of a galaxy with all of these planets that are populated by interesting and strange creatures and the real universe probably won�t be that way. I suspect that intelligent life in the universe is pretty rare. At least life like us. If it weren�t, I suspect we would already, in one way or another, know about it. And alien abductees notwithstanding, there really is no credible evidence that that there is other intelligent life in this galaxy or any other. So at some level I think Star Trek speaks to the way people would like the universe to be, the way we would like to see humanity evolve.

Who wouldn�t love to get aboard a starship and go off exploring other worlds and seeing these astonishing vistas and meet these strange alien creatures. It�s a little sad to recognise that the reality may fall far short of that. But on the other hand nature has a way of surprising us and there are probably things that we cannot even imagine that are more astonishing than anything that we�ve ever seen on Star Trek or any other science fiction.

One only has to look at a few images, I think, from the Hubble space telescope and some of the probes we sent to other planets to realise that the real universe is full of astonishment and wonder. It may not be filled with bipedal life forms who can talk to us via the universal translator, but it is clearly filled with a great deal of wonder and excitement. And, unfortunately, it might take us a little longer to get out there the way that we would like than we might have expected back in the 1960s.