Leaving for another planet

Earlier Mira remarked on how, in these remaining few days before I leave, we are both engrossed in reading SciFi novels set in space. I had thought about this myself. In Red Mars, the characters are on a one-way trip to Mars to establish the first human settlement. The characters struggle with loneliness, homesickness, and claustrophobia as they are trapped in their project. The similarities with my own upcoming journey are not lost on me; I expect that I will often feel alone despite being surrounded with people all the time. Yet, whereas for the Martian colonists there is no reasonable expectation of ever returning home, I am not going so far that I will never return home. It is this connection, home, that gives me strength to leave in the first place. It awes me, in fact, to think that my own ancestors emigrated from Italy, into an unknown certainly more harsh than Shanghai will be for me, presumably with no expectation of ever going back. They didn't have iMessage!