Science fiction is a genre committed to the concept of “run before you can walk.” Long before anyone knew whether heavier-than-air flight was possible, writers were imagining travel to other planets. By the time interplanetary space probes were a reality in the 1960s, the storytellers had long since moved on to thinking interstellar.

Today, two or three generations of happy nerds have grown up in a world saturated with science fiction TV shows and movies featuring the word “star” in their tit