Can career changers really learn from Star Trek?

Space: the final frontier. Familiar words if you’re into your sci-fi. That would be my husband, rather than me. In lock-down we’re currently building our compromise muscles. I get to put on Killing Eve. He gets to watch Star Trek — the 1960s version of course.

If you’ve never heard of it (where have you been?), then Star Trek is set in the future (the natural home of sci-fi). Captain James T Kirk is at the helm of the Starship Enterprise, leading his crew around the galaxy, exploring new worlds and discovering new people. Mostly leaving them in better shape. But not always.

I don’t pay attention in every episode. My mind drifts when the set wobbles or the monster is clearly Larry in a latex suit. And during my meanderings I sometimes wonder whether space really is the final frontier.

It’s certainly big enough — the universe is around 100 billion light years across and still expanding. It’s also fairly final, as we won’t live long enough to explore it all.

Astronomers think there are a billion trillion stars in the observable universe. Neuroscientists say there are 86 billion cells in our brains, each with 10,000 connections — giving us trillions of synapses. So we each house a cosmos in our heads — every cell a tethered star in our own private universe.

But in the way that space is full of…. well… space, so are we. Each atom is 1,000,000 times bigger than the nucleus at its centre. A peanut-sized core in a stadium sized…