For interplanetary, I think it’s more like we looked at some flotsam in the water spinning around and wondered if we could make a canoe based on that principle get to the next island, having only just tippy-toed into the water up to our ankles just to prove it wasn’t immediately lethal.

(Scale difference: Uranus is 7800 times further than the moon [0], so if wading to ankle depth is 1m from the shore, then the metaphorical island is 7.8 km away — pretty close of the distance between the closest parts of Portsmouth and the Isle of Wight [1]).

[0] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Distance%20to%20Uranus%...

[1] https://goo.gl/maps/rvV5cXeb8i8xbVwr9

Really enjoyed these water and swimming analogies, but I think air and flying analogies would be better, since it's just so damn hard to fly. You see the birds and dream, but to actually take off takes something else, and even then we stay relatively close to the ground (within our atmosphere). From someone who's not seen an airplane, to then keep going into the stars is pretty crazy. There's a saying that to become enlightened you have to be willing to fall upwards. I think there's an ingredient of that in exploring new frontiers.

Surprise place name as example