Somewhere between my third cup of chai and an existential crisis, I asked myself a question: What if interstellar travel was real? Not in the Interstellar sense where Matthew McConaughey cries in five dimensions, nor in the Elon Musk sense where we pretend Mars is habitable while dodging tax payments. I mean real—like your parents booking a Vistara ticket to Alpha Centauri to attend your cousin’s wedding, where the buffet features anti-gravity rasmalai and the groom arrives riding a genetically engineered space-elephant.
It’s a ridiculous thought. But then again, so was the idea that we’d be living in a world where our social value is determined by LinkedIn posts that say things like, "Feeling blessed to have secured an unpaid internship in deep-space mining. #Hustle."
In this dystopia of the not-so-distant future, Earth is old money and space is Gurgaon. The rich have fled to better planets where air is a luxury commodity, while the rest of us are stuck dealing with Delhi’s heat, which now has two seasons: “Unbearable” and “Rehearsing for Hell.” The tech bros have transformed entire exoplanets into gated communities with names like Elysium Towers and Mars Grand Residences, while Earth remains the equivalent of that one house in your neighborhood where the paint is peeling, but the landlord still demands higher rent every year.
Space travel, like everything else, follows the iron laws of capitalism. The economy class section of a spaceship resembles the Delhi Metro at Rajiv Chowk during peak hours, except here, if you lose your footing, you might float into an airlock and get ejected into space. Meanwhile, business class passengers sip single-malt while discussing how insanethe stock market is on Proxima B.
Let’s talk science, because without it, this piece will just sound like another WhatsApp forward from your uncle. Interstellar travel, in its most theoretical form, relies on concepts like the Alcubierre Drive—a hypothetical propulsion system that would contract space in front of a spaceship and expand it behind, allowing for faster-than-light travel. It’s the cosmic equivalent of the Delhi government’s odd-even scheme: theoretically brilliant, practically useless. The energy required for such a drive would be on the scale of multiple suns, which means the only real way to achieve this is to harness black holes, and frankly, the last time we relied on a massive, resource-sucking entity to solve our problems, we ended up with the British Raj.
But let’s assume we crack the physics and somehow make this work. What happens to us, the people? Do we evolve into interstellar nomads, perpetually floating from one planet to another, our only sense of home being whatever overpriced co-living pod we’ve rented? Or do we stay back, clinging to Earth as if it were an aging Bollywood hero refusing to retire, determined to fix a place that no longer wants to be fixed?
Psychologically, space travel is a nightmare. Humans are social creatures—we need chai tapris, passive-aggressive aunties, and the occasional moral outrage to stay sane. Imagine being on a ship for years with nothing but AI companions, who, no matter how advanced, will never understand the true suffering of missing an India-Pakistan match due to network issues.
Sure, the idea of a cosmic diaspora is poetic. But the deeper you go into space, the more you confront an unsettling truth: Home is not where the heart is. Home is where gravity holds you down.
It’s possible that one day, interstellar travel will be as routine as catching an Indigo flight, delays and all. But in that world, I don’t see a utopia. I see gated planets, corporate overlords deciding who gets to live where, and a society that still refuses to provide free WiFi. We’ll have gone billions of miles just to recreate the same inequalities we had back on Earth, except this time, the property disputes involve entire solar systems.
Maybe, in the end, space isn’t the final frontier. Maybe the real frontier is learning to fix what we have before we go looking for more worlds to ruin. Because if history has taught us anything, it’s that we don’t really explore new places. We colonize them. And in space, no one can hear you gentrify.
So until we figure that out, I think I’ll stay put. There may be no future here, but at least the chai is still good. interstellar travel interstellar travel
