This was initially published in audio form as Burst 7 of the Wow! Signal. As part of the ongoing effort to tie this blog into that podcast and vice versa, we here present a slightly edited text version of the same.
This is a tutorial post, and is largely meant to bring some of our readers up to speed, since we are going to be talking about interstellar space flight more over the next months. If you have ever wondered by we can’t just get on a big rocket and fly to the stars, this is for you. If you already know why we can’t do that, then I think you might want to skip this one.