Mark Medley is The Globe and Mail’s Deputy Opinion Editor. He is the author of Live to See the Day: Impossible Goals, Unimaginable Futures, and the Pursuit of Things That May Never Be, from which the following essay has been partly adapted.
Earlier this week, my family sat around the dining room table and shared their resolutions for 2026. My 10-year-old son vowed to learn five songs on his new electric guitar; my wife, who creates a bingo card outlining her aims for the next 12 months, rattled off an impressive list, explaining in detail how this would be the year she truly changed her life.
I sat in silence, trying to think of something, anything, I wanted to accomplish. Frankly, I’ve never been one for New Year’s resolutions. Mine tend to be boring, uninspiring, obvious: Go to the gym twice a week; brush up on my French; put more of my paycheque into an RRSP. Most years, if I made one at all, I’ve forgotten about it – okay, consciously abandoned it – by the end of January.
The curious thing is that for the past six years I’ve been thinking almost non-stop about goals – and what is a New Year’s resolution if not a goal you hope to complete before you need to buy another calendar? My obsession, however, has been goals of a different sort – not a vow to read more books or eat healthier or spend less money – but goals the pursuers knew from the outset were unlikely to be realized in their lifetime, that might only come to pass decades or centuries or even millenniums from now. Goals that most people would consider to be impossible.
These didn’t include New Year’s resolutions, of course. But as I sat there, eating dinner with my family, thinking about what I could choose as my goal for 2026, it struck me that maybe I’d been going about it the wrong way. That maybe the key to the perfect resolution is to pick something you know you’ll never achieve.
Hipparchus working in his Alexandria observatory with telescope and orbital models in a book illustration from 1880.Getty Images
Several years ago, I travelled to Tucson, Ariz., for a spaceship convention. Specifically, a symposium organized by the Interstellar Research Group (IRG), the pre-eminent gathering in the world – and possibly the galaxy – for those who’ve dedicated their lives to leaving this same world behind.
This is a resolution that will take vastly longer than 365 days to complete. Proxima Centauri, the closest star to our sun, is located 4.2 light years from the Earth. A light year, in case the term isn’t obvious enough, is the distance light travels in a year, and converting one into a common unit of measure boggles the mind: 9.46 trillion kilometres. Light travels fast – over 1 billion kilometres an hour – but even at that speed it would take, um, 4.2 years to reach Proxima, the smallest member of the Alpha Centauri triple star system. We cannot go that fast. Voyager 1, which began its journey in 1977 and in 2012 became the first human-made craft to enter interstellar space, travels a leisurely 61,000 kilometres an hour. At that pace it would take about 75,000 years to arrive at Proxima, which paradoxically means “nearest” in Latin – not exactly a weekend getaway. We shouldn’t pack our suitcases quite yet.
And yet all the people I encountered throughout the weekend wanted to try. It pained me how much they wanted to try. The symposium was attended by a wide variety of stargazers – hobbyists tinkering away in their garages and academics sporting CVs stretching to the moon-and-back and NASA-affiliated engineers and literal rocket scientists with the backing of deep-pocketed space exploration startups. The one thing everyone who descended upon this desert city had in common was that they’d devoted their lives, or at least their dreams, to figuring out a way to get us off this planet and toward a new one.
The way this goal would be accomplished was far beyond me. The presentations sported names like “Deceleration of Interstellar Spacecraft Utilizing Antimatter” and “Pulsed Plasma Rocket: Developing a Dynamic Fission Process for High Specific Impulse and High Thrust Propulsion” and “Phenomenology and Capabilities of Mutually Guided Laser and Neutral Particle Beams for Deep Space Propulsion.” Individually I understood what these words meant, but when assembled in this order they might as well have been ancient Greek. For the first time in many years, I regretted not having taken a science class since Grade 10.
“The flood of ideas that you’re going to see tomorrow is going to be pretty amazing,” said Kenneth Roy, one of the IRG’s founding members, the day before the presentations began. The symposium grew out of a weekly dinner party that Mr. Roy and his wife began hosting in Oak Ridge, Tenn., a small city just west of Knoxville, in 2004. The couple had been involved in the local science-fiction community for years, and the dinners attracted others who shared their enthusiasm for all things out-of-this-world: physicists and scientists and engineers and authors. The first-ever Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop, as it was originally called, took place at a decidedly terrestrial DoubleTree hotel in Oak Ridge in 2011. The symposiums, growing larger each year, soon attracted the leading names in the interstellar community, and the group, which began to hold events outside the Tennessee Valley, rebranded itself as the Interstellar Research Group in 2020. Its ultimate goal was “establishing outposts throughout the solar system” and “achieving a pathway to the stars.”
Mr. Roy knew he wouldn’t live to see this achievement. Instead, he said, these gatherings allowed him to “give back to the future.” While the theories and technologies and missions being discussed in Tucson would likely only be realized generations from now, that didn’t make it any less vital work. To Mr. Roy, interstellar travel was not simply a scientific question but an existential one, as well.
“The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of civilizations that made the very rational choice not to go into space. Each one discovered, investigated, and remembered by the civilization that made the irrational choice,” he said, quoting the writer Randall Munroe. “It’s comfortable just to hang out here on planet Earth. But it seems like there’s a universal dictate that you either expand or you stagnate and die. We have got to expand.”
While the IRG has been organizing these gatherings for 15 years, interstellar travel is a quest that stretches back through the centuries. Ever since the ancient satirist Lucian of Samosata “went” to the moon almost two thousand years ago, we’ve been dreaming up ways to explore the universe. The Scottish polymath William Leitch first recommended using rockets to power off-world exploration in his 1861 essay “A Journey Through Space” (though, to be fair, he also suggested hitching a ride on a comet); the first major book (at least in English) to address the subject of spaceflight, The Conquest of Space, was published in 1931.
“To the imaginative mind viewing the star-filled heavens and the luminous glow of the planets there is present continually a world of mystery, and the suggestion of tremendous adventure beyond the Earth,” wrote its author, David Lasser, co-founder of the American Interplanetary Society. “Since the day when man discovered the planets to be worlds similar to our Earth two questions have filled his mind: How can I get there? And what will I find?”
These are questions that have tempted humankind since we first noticed the stars. And they feel as out of grasp today as when Lasser wrote those words. When I raised this point to Matthew Gorban, a bespectacled, curly-haired doctoral student from Baylor University I was having breakfast with one morning in Tucson, he mentioned an anonymous quote that summed up my feelings exactly: We are the middle children of history, it goes. Too old to explore the Earth, and too young to explore the stars.
“That really resonates with me,” he said, then added: “It is a little bit depressing.”
At 25, he was the youngest of the conference’s presenters (topic: “Controllable Mass Propellantless Propulsion Drive: A Gedankenexperiment”) by at least a couple of decades. I’d reached out to him because I’d wanted to talk to someone at the start of their career, someone who’d gone into the field knowing success would always remain out of grasp. Mr. Gorban would not be zipping around the solar system in spaceships any time soon. When I’d e-mailed him a few weeks before the symposium to introduce myself, and tell him about my own research, he’d written back excitedly: “It’s funny, I believe I have spoken those exact words ‘won’t be accomplished in my lifetime’ before.” Now, as we lingered over our second cups of coffee, I asked him again: Why was he pursuing a dream that would remain just that?
“My dreams of going into space and exploring the cosmos are so strong,” he said, “that even if I can’t do it, I want that to be a reality for someone else at some point.”
There is something incredibly admirable in starting a project knowing it will only benefit the future. Which was underscored when I found myself in a Norwegian wood the following year.
'The longest night though longer far, would fail.' One of William Blake's illustrations for the 1797 edition of Night Thoughts by poet Edward Young.PUBLIC DOMAIN
On my very first day at The Globe and Mail, in September, 2014, before I’d even stepped foot inside the newsroom, I learned that Margaret Atwood had been named the first participant in a new project by the Scottish conceptual artist Katie Paterson. Ms. Atwood had committed to donating a manuscript –it could be a story or a poem, a play or a novel; anything – that would remain unread by anyone for a hundred years, at which point most everyone presently alive, reading my story in the newspaper the following day, would be dead. Every year for a century a different author would be invited to contribute a manuscript to the “Future Library,” which I described in my article as “part Noah’s Ark and part time capsule.” These works wouldn’t be published until the hard-to-fathom year 2114. In the meantime, the pages would be stored in a vault, in the Oslo public library, the only books in the building that could not be put in circulation.
One hundred authors, one hundred manuscripts, eventually printed on paper provided by trees planted at the project’s outset, one hundred years earlier.
“I’ll be gone when people read the words,” Ms. Paterson told me. “All of us will be gone.”
I visited Norway in the summer of 2022 for the opening of the “Silent Room,” as the vault on the top floor of the Deichman Library is known, an event that saw many of the project’s participants travel to Oslo to file their manuscripts away in the small chamber, work that none of us who’d gathered at the library would ever have the opportunity to read.
“I can’t imagine a hundred years ahead,” the Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard told me, clutching his manuscript tightly as we stood outside the Silent Room. “I won’t be here. My children won’t be here. No one I know will be here. It will be someone else. And it’s very scary, very frightening and terrifying. But also: How can you say no to that? You can’t.”
After Mr. Knausgaard and the other authors had safely stashed away their manuscripts, I snuck into the Silent Room where, to my surprise, I found another one of the participants, the British novelist David Mitchell, sitting on a small bench with his eyes closed. “I’m just thinking of all the people who will come sit here and think – I’m saying hello to them,” he said by way of explanation. It made sense to me: The chamber was meant to conjure the inside of a tree, but, to me, it felt the closest I’d ever come to standing in a time machine. “I think of a cryogenic chamber, in one of those interstellar spaceships, that will cross the distance between the stars,” said Mr. Mitchell.
We remained there a while, taking it all in, but eventually a line began forming outside the room. I experienced a momentary sadness, realizing that this would be the last time I was near these books. That I would never have the chance to read them. As if thinking the same thing, Mr. Mitchell asked me to take a photograph to mark this occasion. Who knew if we’d ever be back here? I took his phone and snapped a few shots of him sitting there, amongst the books – a time capsule of a time capsule.
It’s no small thing for a writer to agree to publish a manuscript only after they’ve died; posthumous books are more often due to circumstance, not choice. But Ms. Paterson had convinced some of the world’s most prominent writers – as well as prominent writers not yet born – to save their work for a day they wouldn’t live to see.
“I see it as a hopeful project,” Mr. Mitchell had said earlier. “Every work of art, every poem composed, or music composed, or every movement in dance, is a gesture of hope, because it’s a gesture done against destruction, it’s a gesture done against our deep-felt knowledge that one day we will not be here. It’s a gesture acknowledging that we are living in a hard, horrible world, that one day none of us will be here […] Despite everything, you do this gesture. And the Future Library is a big gesture.”
'The Traveller Hasteth in the Evening' and 'Death's Door,' illustrated plates from William Blake’s 1793 emblem book, The Gates of Paradise.PUBLIC DOMAIN
A New Year’s resolution doesn’t need to be as big a gesture as interstellar travel or the Future Library, of course. (I was drawn to rather outlandish goals – finding a mystery ape in the rainforests of Sumatra; ensuring the Earth can defend itself from a civilization-destroying asteroid.) But there’s something to be said to looking past the year, beyond the horizon, and into a future you, too, won’t live to see.
I’ll be the first to admit this is not an easy thing to do. We live in a time of instant gratification – forget about taking a year to accomplish a resolution. But there’s gratification in thinking about the long-term, about starting something today that will benefit your children, or grandchildren, or unknown generations to come.
A few times over the years, despite a pair of flat feet my childhood podiatrist vowed would leave me crippled by the time I reached middle age, my New Year’s resolution was to take up running. I’d buy a fresh pair of sneakers, wake before the sun, and hit the streets. I never intended to run a marathon, but something a bit more manageable – a 5-km race, maybe push it to 10 km depending on my progress. But the January cold always sent me scurrying back under the covers, my shoes barely scuffed, the race never run.
This year, I think I’ll rescue those shoes from the depths of my closet, lace them up and take off, not knowing how long the race will last, and not caring if I ever cross a finish line.