If you have watched the Star Trek or star wars movies or even the stargate series depending on which generation you had the pleasure of being born in or on what TV stations aired when you reached the age at which your memory seems to have started you may have noticed the over bearing theme and excitement that space travel offers.

If many years ago it seemed like pure science fiction, it seems now this concept draws nearer and nearer to fruition. As an staunch science fiction buff, I follow quite a bit of what happens in the world of science specifically physics and engineering. From the discoveries that seem to be happening daily to the big announcement coming from the leaders in these fields.

The founder of Space X, the company contracted by the US government to deliver supplies to the international space station and also the same company that won the contract to be take the first humans to mars recently announced the plans for the mars rockets and in his speech he expressed great excitement.

To "be out there among the stars ... That's the future that's exciting. You need things like that to be glad to wake up in the morning. Life can't just be about solving problems, they have to be inspiring and make you glad to be alive."    -- Elon Musk

Last year, a movie, “Martian,” staring Matt Damon was released and a review of the movie showed just how close to real it was to depicting how life on mars would be.

Starting 2017, Elon Musk’s Space x will be sending unmanned missions to the aptly named red planet (aka Mars) as the human race takes another big leap towards the heavens.

Now this gets me excited because, ideally, I would like to be on that first mission to mars (Day dreaming out loud). Who’s to say it can’t happen???? Well so this is what it takes to be an astronaut:

• Lot of years of education.a
• A ton of work experience.
• A knack for problem solving.
• A very high IQ.
• Tons of good favour (or what other people call luck).

Oh well, maybe by then I will have all that list checked.

That’s all a matter of hope and faith backed up with a lot of hard work, but that doesn’t make it impossible. If I can’t do it, maybe you the reader can succeed and be one of the pioneers beyond our earthly barriers as the human race seeks to conquer a new frontier.

I bet the next impossibility to become a possibility is time travel. I wonder what physics it would take to create a window in time. Maybe a black hole or maybe a wormhole. As the guys with the extremely huge IQs (That could be you by the way) keep finding the answers to these questions, how about the rest of us keep asking the questions. Let my contribution be the question that forced the modern day Einstein to come up with an alternative theory of relativity that could probably explain what happens beyond the event horizon of a black hole.

Till then I will as Albert Einstein once said, “Never stop asking questions.”