Voyage to Pandora: Humanity’s First Interstellar Flight

Today on Discovery Enterprise we take an imaginary voyage to the world of Pandora depicted in the motion picture Avatar and look at the possibility of humanity one day taking a very real interstellar odyssey to worlds beyond our solar system.

The setting of the movie Avatar takes place in the year 2154 on the terrestrial like moon of Pandora.

Pandora is a lush, Earth-like moon of the planet Polyphemus in the Alpha Centauri star system. Pandora is inhabited by the Na’vi, a ten-foot-tall blue-skinned species of sapient humanoids,[ who live in harmony with nature, worshiping a mother goddess called Eywa.

Its location is a real place – Alpha Centauri, the nearest star to our Sun and the most likely destination for our first journey beyond the solar system.

Remarkably, it is anti-matter, the science fiction fuel of choice that could take us there. Normally, it’s only created in powerful jets that roar out of black holes. We can now produce small quantities in Earth-bound particle colliders. Will we journey out only to plunder other worlds? Or will we come in peace? The answer may depend on how we view our home world, the Earth, at that time in the distant future.

Voyage to Pandora: Humanity’s First interstellar Flight