Building a successful company (or living a happy life, for that matter) is not about embracing someone else's philosophy, but staying true to your own beliefs about the world and learning from the mistakes you make along the way.

The big reason why we don't have space colonies and regular trips to the moon is that flying into outer space is just plain 'hard.' The business of safely transporting people off the Earth is a costly affair that requires a lot of technology.

With every inch of land on Earth now catalogued by our satellites, the stars are the next place we as a species must travel. And with a booming world population that will hit 9.1 billion in 2050, large-scale space travel may become a necessity.

Entrepreneurs may be brutally honest, but fostering relationships with partners and building enduring communities requires empathy, self-sacrifice and a willingness to help others without expecting anything in return.

So you've decided to travel around the world. This is an excellent thing to do. It's a precious place, this planet. We should see it.

Science fiction in particular is often assumed to be about the future, or about some abstract technological or philosophical idea, or just about 'adventure,' but writers can't build worlds out of nothing. We use bits and pieces of the real world to assemble our fictional ones.

I love to travel. This is the time for me. When will I do it if not now?

My family went to Toronto to visit relatives when I was 13 or 14. It was the first time we had ever been abroad. This was the early Eighties, and I remember the impossible glamour of air travel - my mum spending days trying to decide what she was going to wear on the plane.