The Fastest Spaceship in Science Fiction and Reality

Which spaceship will get you to Alpha Centauri the fastest? Would you choose the Heart of Gold from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy or the Millennium Falcon? What about Serenity or the U.S.S. Enterprise? While it’s hard to know just how fast some of these fictional spaceships can travel, Slate’s Chris Kirk takes a stab at it. Kirk (yes, that’s really his name) looks at the stories behind each of the spaceships and does his best to determine each ship’s maximum speed. There’s an animated graphic on the Slate site that shows each ship cruising across the universe so you can easily visualize the relative speeds.

According to Kirk, the Heart of Gold, which runs off an infinite improbability drive and the TARDIS both travel anywhere instantaneously. The slowest fictional ship is the Serenity (sorry, Captain Reynolds).